Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Book

Free Spanish VMware technology ebook available now!

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A couple of months ago I was asked if I wanted to write a foreword for an upcoming ebook. I have done this various times, but this one was particularly interesting. Why? Well, there are 3 good reasons:

  1. This book is written by 14 community experts, many of which I have met over the past years.
  2. It is a free, but sponsored, ebook!
  3. All sponsor proceeds will go to charity.

The first book I wrote was also a book with multiple authors, it was only a handful of people and that was painful enough as it is. An insane amount of coordination is involved usually and I have a lot of respect for these guys, 14 people writing a single book is not easy.

On top of that, these guys decided to cover multiple VMware technologies, ranging from NSX to VDI to vSphere etc. Very cool if you ask me. Oh, and before I forget… They have already managed to collect over 25.000 Euro for charity. Great job guys, what an achievement. I am not going to say much more, just download the book (if you read/speak Spanish)! Thanks for letting me part of this.

https://www.vmwareporvexperts.org/

Free E-Book: Operationalizing VMware vSAN

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A while ago my colleague and friend Kevin Lees reached out to me and asked me if I could go over some material he wrote together with Paul Wiggett. He also asked me if I would be willing to write a foreword. When Kevin send the document over I literally finished it within a day. What I enjoyed most about this vSAN book was the fact that it wasn’t a deep dive, it wasn’t drilling down on technology, instead the people/process aspect of things are being discussed. This is an area which is often overlooked, and definitely an area that deserves more attention when people are looking to adopt software-defined storage, or the software-defined data center for that matter. Thanks Paul/Kevin for providing me the opportunity to write the foreword, I just downloaded my free copy and I have to say it looks great.

If you are interested, the book can be downloaded for free through the VMware Virtual Blocks blog, simply go here and download your copy.

 

vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book coming soon!

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Cormac and I decided to update the vSAN Essentials book. We added a whole bunch of extra info and also decided to rebrand it. “Essentials” did not really cut it, it is much more than that. Considering I just finished the Clustering Deep Dive with Frank and Niels, we figured this could be a nice addition to that series, complementing both the Host Deep Dive as well as the Clustering Deep Dive. We’ve received all the feedback from our reviewers, Frank Denneman and Pete Koehler, and spend various evenings digesting and processing it. Now it is just a matter of adding the foreword to the book, and then we can simply press: Publish. Hopefully, within 2 weeks, I will have a new article that details how you can buy the book!

The plan is right now to release the paper copy and the ebook at the same time, we will link the books, so those who buy the paper copy can buy the ebook at a discounted price. We will also make sure the ebook is priced very attractive, as we feel it should be the format of choice for everyone!

HA Admission control: How can I check how much reserved resources are used?

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I had this question twice in the past three months, so somehow this is something which isn’t clear to everyone. With HA Admission Control you set aside capacity for fail-over scenarios, this is capacity which is reserved. But of course VMs also use reservations, how can you see what the total combined used reserved capacity is including Admission Control?

Well, that is actually pretty simple it appears. If you open the Web Client, or the H5 client, and go to your cluster then you have a “Monitor” tab, under the Monitor tab there’s an option called “Resource Reservation” and it has graphs for both CPU as well as Memory. This actually includes admission control. To verify this I took a screenshot in the H5 client before enabling admission control, and after enabling it, as you can see a big increase in “reserved resources”, which indicates that admission control is taken into consideration.

Before:

After:

This is also covered in our Deep Dive book, by the way, if you want to know more, pick it up.

Now Available: vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive book!

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Over the past couple of months Frank, Niels and I have worked ferociously to update the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive. Some of the material was already brought up to date to vSphere 6.0 U2, but the majority was never updated after vSphere 5.1. As you can imagine, this was a tremendous undertaking. Not only did we need to validate every sentence, all diagrams needed to be updated, and with the introduction of the HTML-5 Client also all screenshots had to be retaken. 

Now, just a couple of weeks before VMworld, we are finally at the point where we can press “publish”.

What can you expect? Well, we have said this with previous books, this is not a beginners guide! This is a deep dive, and we aimed to take you in to the trenches of vSphere Clustering technologies. We cover a multitude of different features, and for those who haven’t read the previous books expect the following features to be covered:

  • vSphere HA
  • vSphere DRS
  • vSphere Storage DRS
  • vSphere Storage I/O Control
  • vSphere Network I/O Control

We also have a chapter on stretched clusters, in this chapter we describe how to design and implement a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster, leveraging all of the knowledge gained in the previous chapters.

For your convenience, I copied/pasted some of the Amazon info below.

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  • Paperback: 566 pages
  • Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (July 29, 2018)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1722625325
  • ISBN-13: 978-1722625320
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds

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I hope all of you will enjoy the book as much as we enjoyed writing it. And before I forget, I want to thank my co-authors for the late night discussions, the hard work, insights and fun/laughter at times.

Get it while it is hot! (Look on the right side column for the links to the book!)