Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Soon in a book store near you! HA and DRS Deepdive

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Over the last couple of months Frank Denneman and I have been working really hard on a secret project. Although we have spoken about it a couple of times on twitter the topic was never revealed.

Months ago I was thinking about what a good topic would be for my next book. As I already wrote a lot of articles on HA it made sense to combine these and do a full deepdive on HA. However a VMware Cluster is not just HA. When you configure a cluster there is something else that usually is enabled and that is DRS. As Frank is the Subject Matter Expert on Resource Management / DRS it made sense to ask Frank if he was up for it or not… Needless to say that Frank was excited about this opportunity and that was when our new project was born: VMware vSphere 4.1 – HA and DRS deepdive.

As both Frank and I are VMware employees we contacted our management to see what the options were for releasing this information to market. We are very excited that we have been given the opportunity to be the first official publication as part of a brand new VMware initiative, codenamed Rome. The idea behind Rome along with pertinent details will be announced later this year.

Our book is currently going through the final review/editing stages. For those wondering what to expect, a sample chapter can be found here. The primary audience for the book is anyone interested in high availability and clustering. There is no prerequisite knowledge needed to read the book however, the book will consist of roughly 220 pages with all the detail you want on HA and DRS. It will not be a “how to” guide, instead it will explain the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS like Primary Nodes, Admission Control Policies, Host Affinity Rules and Resource Pools. On top of that, we will include basic design principles to support the decisions that will need to be made when configuring HA and DRS or when designing a vSphere infrastructure.

I guess it is unnecessary to say that both Frank and I are very excited about the book. We hope that you will enjoy reading it as much as we did writing it. Stay tuned for more info, the official book title and url to order the book. We hope to be able to give you an update soon.

Frank and Duncan

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Congratulations, Duncan! I’m looking forward to reading the book, I’m sure it’s going to be excellent content coming from two outstanding experts.

  5. I’m looking forward to your book. I also liked the previous short book, I’ll be having a nice read tonight.

    When & where for the book signing?

  8. Hopefully we can do a book signing at the dutch VMUG if people are interested.

    Looking forward to it. Congratulations to the both of you

  11. Any chance you will be covering the new “fake” vm creation process in 4.1 according to KB1022843? I’d like to see more deep details on the work flow and timing.

  13. Congratulations guys. Just what the market needed because frankly, I’ve been hearing too many instances about how VMotion is used to HA VMs to other hosts when a cluster node fails. I’ve also heard in 3+ candidate interviews about how DRS (Disaster Recovery Services) is used to protect the business if your building goes down. Another thorough explanation I heard last week about DRS is “it gives memory to VMs”. Huh.

    Rock on guys.

  15. That’s awesome news, can’t wait to read this one! Congrats to both of you!

  21. Congratulations guys!
    Considering the quality (including readability!) of the blog post on both subjects by you guys , I’m sure this book will rock.
    Looking forward to learn something 🙂

  22. Congrats!
    I’m glad there will be an official book now instead of all the articles printed out and stapled together in my bag to carry around with me.

  25. Looking forward to it. If the sample chapter is any indication, this will be an excellent read and reference.

  32. Hi Duncan,

    Really appreciate all your efforts in publishing such important knowledge in black and white for all the interested techies out there who loves vmware.

    Keep it up…..and awaiting the release of the same….Good Luck….

    And thanks a lot

  33. Great googely moogely! Yeah, this book will be fantastic, I have no doubt. It will go right on top of my shortcuts down the path of virtualization book. I just hope its bigger so I can scrap the 10x magnification glasses necessary to read it :).

  34. Cool. There is definitely a need for more books like this and I will be looking forward to this. I am not sure who the publisher is but hoping that they will get this book to India soon as well. Just the way they got Scott Lowe’s book.

  35. I can’t wait! I read the QS book cover to cover over a couple of days. I’ll do the same with this. I’m sure I’m not the only admin out there just a little nervous to turn on HA. DRS doesn’t scare me, but HA does.