A couple of weeks ago Alan Renouf contacted me and asked me if it was okay to turn some of our best practices mentioned in the book into PowerCLI code. I thought about it for 0.00001 seconds and yelled: hell yeah! Alan worked on it for a couple of days over the last couple of weeks and this is the result. Alan hasn’t been able to get the full book into his audit script, but knowing Alan he will get their in a couple of weeks (no pressure). Not only does the outcome of the audit script look really cool, it is also very useful. I will be working with Alan on refining and enhancing it over the next couple of weeks so check Alan’s website on a regular basis for updates. Once again, Alan great work…
Book
New Book: Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director
This is one of those days that you realize how quickly things can change… 3.5 years ago I worked for a small consultancy company in the south of the Netherlands. Today I work for the number 1 virtualization/cloud company in the world, VMware, and just published my 4th book with a 5th coming later this year. What a ride, what a change, a lot of work and yes it was more than worth it.
I was part of a team of 6 guys who worked on this new book that was just published in the Short Topics series by Sage/Usenix. I guess you could say it is a follow up of “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4”. This book deals with VMware vCloud Director and touches each of the components of vCloud Director. Although it is a short topic series with only 136 pages there is in-depth information to be found on the various aspects of vCloud environments. I guess for me personally the most exciting part is the fact that no one less than VMware CEO Paul Maritz wrote the foreword! That is a great honor!
I want to especially thank Ben Lin and John Arrasjid for bringing this together. I know they’ve spend countless of hours in the evening editing the book. Of course I also want to thank my fellow co-authors: Michael Haines, Steve Kaplan and Raman Veeramraju. It was a pleasure working with you guys. I also want to thank Usenix/Sage for this opportunity. I want to point out that none of the authors receives or has received royalties. (Except for complementary copies of the book which we will give away for free at various events!) Usenix / Sage is a great organization which organizes many great events to which hopefully the revenue of this book will contribute.
Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks. The book includes a 17″x38″ poster with a deepdive on vCloud Director networking.
- Authors: John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan, Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju
- Paperback: 136 pages
- Publisher: Sage/Usenix (May, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-13: 978-1-931971-83-6
Buy it here on Amazon (Paper | ebook coming soon)
Cool feature for Kindle users
I was lurking around the Kindle website to figure out how to enable “Public Notes” as I would love to read comments on our book and figure out how we can improve the content. Some of the things that we wrote make a lot of sense to us but might not make a lot of sense to you. I encourage everyone to take the following steps and enable public notes on the books you own. I have enabled mine for the following books that I recently bought for the Kindle. Here are the steps required to enable it:
- Login to https://kindle.amazon.com/ with your Amazon account
- Click on “Your Books”
- Tick the “Public Notes: Make yours public” tickbox
It is as simple as that. I have just bought our book so that I can read your public notes, so take it away! I started reading the vSphere Design book this week and I have added some notes already. I will try to make notes for books each book I buy / read and share them with you and hope all of you will do the same.
What? An ebook? Is this a late April Fools’ joke?
No it isn’t a late April Fools’ joke… And we never expected this to actually happen to be honest. Last week I had discussion about the ebook on twitter and people were convinced that ebooks are the way to go. I won’t deny that and I know Frank agrees with me on this as well but the fact of the matter is that we just didn’t have the time to do all the reformatting work. I asked once again on twitter if someone knew any tools that we could leverage or if someone could give us a hand. The last 4 times I asked this question no one responded and again hardly anyone did, however a close relative of mine did contact me and told me he had some tools that could possibly help us. I forwarded the PDF and the DOCX file and within a couple of hours I received an almost clean .html file back. The email also contained a very important tip, Mobipocket Creator. So I installed it and added the html file to it and clicked “Convert”….
Yes it was close, but not close enough to be published yet. I shared the book with Frank and both of us opened it up in our Kindle App and reviewed the layout. We marked all the pages that had some glitches and started editing those. We expected to be done in a couple of hours but it ended up being a full day again for both of us… but who cares the result is worth it.
After doing research on the Kindle Store we had another decision to make; pricing. We noticed that some ebooks are more expensive than the paper version, WHAT? We didn’t want to do that. We never expected to release this and every copy sold is an extra copy sold of our book and we know that many who wanted the ebook bought the paper version instead so we decided to make it cheap, almost half the price of the cheapest vSphere book on the list (calling all publishers, revisit your pricing strategy!) and $ 17.45 less than the paper version.
But before we give you the link, one of the most asked questions… Why Kindle? Well Kindle happens to be a multi-platform solution. The Kindle Application is available for Mac, Windows, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7. Which made us believe that if we had to pick one format Kindle was the way to go.
So without further ado we present: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive, the ebook…… for only $ 7.50. Pick it up,
Frank & Duncan
ps: it is also available in the UK Kindle Store for £5.36.
HA/DRS Deepdive now available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de
After 14 emails with absolutely no reply whatsoever our book, vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive, popped up on both the German and UK version of Amazon. For those who haven’t ordered it yet through comcol.nl you can also get it here:
Sorry about the delay and I hope they will continue selling it for a very long time. (It seems they don’t have it on stock currently so delivery might take a while.)
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And in France as well through Amazon I just noticed
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