Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

deepdive

New book: VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive

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Cormac Hogan and I have been working late nights and weekends over the past months to update our vSAN book material. Thanks Cormac, it was once again a pleasure working with you on this project! As you may know, we released two versions of a vSAN based book through VMware Press. The book was titled vSAN Essentials. As mentioned before, after restructuring and rewriting a lot of the content we felt that the title of the book didn’t match the content, so we decided to rebrand it to vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive. After receiving very thorough reviews by Frank Denneman and Pete Koehler (Thanks guys!) we managed to complete it this week after we added a great foreword by our business unit’s SVP and General Manager, Yanbing Li.

Cormac and I decided to take the self-publishing route for this book, which allows us to set a great price for the ebook and enable the Amazon matchbook option, giving everyone who buys the paper version through Amazon the option to buy the e-book with a nice discount! As prices will vary based on location I am only going to list the USD prices. Please check your local Amazon website for localized prices. Oh, and before I forget, I would like to recommend buying the ebook flavor! Why? Well:

“On average, each printed book releases 8.85 pounds of carbon dioxide into the environment. Together, the newspaper and book-printing industries cut down 125 million trees per year and emit 44 million tons of CO2.”

We appreciate all support, but we prefer the cleanest option from an environmental stance, this is also the reason we priced the ebook a lot cheaper than the paper version. Anyway, here are the links to the US store, we hope you enjoy the content, and of course as always an Amazon review would be appreciated! Interestingly, it seems we already reached number 1 in the category Virtualization and the category Storage before this announcement, thanks everyone, we really appreciate it! (Please note, as an Amazon Associate I earn from below qualifying purchases.)

 

UPDATE:

It appears that some Amazon stores take a bit longer to index the content, so listing all the different versions below for the different stores that sell it:

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!)

Some recent updates to HA deepdive

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Just a short post to point out that I updated the VVol section in the HA Deepdive. If you downloaded it, make sure to download the latest version. Note that I have added a version number to the intro and a changelog at the end so you can see what changes. Also, I recommend subscribing to it, as I plan to do some more updates in the upcoming months. For the update I’ve been playing with a Nimble (virtual) array all day today and it allowed me to create some cool screenshots of how HA works in a VVol environment. I was also seriously impressed by how easy it was to setup the Nimble (virtual) array and how simple VVol was to configure for them. Not just that, but the number of policy options Nimble exposes, I was amazed. Below is just an example of some of the things you can configure!

vvol-nimble

The screenshot below shows the Virtual Volumes created for a VM, this is the view from a Storage perspective:
Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 11.59.16

vSphere HA deepdive 6.x available for free!

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I’ve been discussing this over the last 12 months with Frank, and to be honest we are still not sure what is the right thing to do but we decided to take this step anyway. Over the past couple of years we released various updates of the vSphere Clustering Deepdive. Updating the book sometimes was a massive pain (version 4 to 5 for instance), but some of the minor updates have been relative straight forward, although still time consuming due to formatting / diagrams / screenshots etc.

Ever since we’ve been looking for new ways to distribute our book, or publication as I will refer to it from now on. I’ve looked at various options, and found one which I felt was the best of all worlds: Gitbook. Gitbook is a solution which allows you as an author to develop content in Markdown and distribute it in various different formats. This could be as static html, pdf, ePub or Mobi. Basically any format you would want in this day and age. The great thing about the platform as well is that it integrates with Github and you can share your source there and do things like version control etc. It does it in such a way that I can use the Gitbook client on my Mac, while someone else who wants to contribute or submit a change can simply use their client of choice and submit a change through git. Although I don’t expect too many people to do this, it will make it easier for me to have material reviewed for instance by one of the VMware engineers.

So what did I just make available for free? Well in short, an updated version (vSphere 6.0 Update 1) of the vSphere HA Deepdive. This includes the stretched clustering section of the book. Note that DRS and SDRS have not been included (yet). This may or may not happen in some shape or form in the future though. For now, I hope you will enjoy and appreciate the content that I made available for free. You can access it by clicking “HA Deepdive” on the left, or (in my opinion) for a better reading experience read it on Gitbook directly through this link: ha.yellow-bricks.com.

Note that there are links as well to download the content in different formats, for those who want to read it on their iPad / phone / whatever. Also note that Gitbook allows you to comment on a paragraph by clicking the “+” sign on the right side of the paragraph when you hover over it… Please submit feedback when you see mistakes! And for those who are really active, if you want to you could even contribute to the content! I will keep updating the content over the upcoming months probably with more info on VVols and for instance the Advanced Settings, so keep checking back regularly!