by Duncan Epping
As I had this question many times by now I figured a short blog article wouldn’t hurt. Yes, the vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS Kindle copy is also free in other amazon shops, but just today… so pick it up now:
Just a limited offer, two days only… The VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS tech deepdive is free. WHAT? Yes it is free… $ 0,-. So hop over to amazon and pick up your free Kindle copy today!
For those who have been living under a rock, this book will explain the ins and outs of both vSphere HA and DRS. Admission Control, Resource Pools, Limits, HA Restart Timelines… it is all in there. Pick it up!
I just finished overhauling the vSphere HA Deepdive page. It now includes details about all versions of HA but is specifically split up in two sections:
I also cleaned up all comments. Although there were a lot of useful details in there the amount of comments made it impossible to maintain. With all changes in 5.0 I wanted to make sure the page was a single source of truth and no myths/rumors would start floating around based on the outdated comments. Please note that I will clean up the comments every once in a while and update the page when needed based on these comments. If there are any questions / comments or things you feel should be explained in this deepdive, feel free to drop them here.
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.
I’ve had this question too many times over the last couple of weeks and instead of answering all of them separately I figured I would dedicate a blog article to it so that I can reference to that. Here we go:
Q) Will the e-book version of the HA/DRS deepdive be available soon?
A) No. We have decided that we will not release an e-book (including pdf, ibook, kindle) version of the book. It required a full reformatting of the book which is simple not feasible at this point in time. As it is a “self published” book we are responsible for not only the content but also the formatting etc. Sorry about that, for “Volume 2” however we will reconsider this.
I hope this answers your question(s). Thanks and again our apologies, the only option is the paper version.
UPDATE: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/04/05/what-an-ebook-is-this-a-late-april-fools-joke/