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** Update: Available now: paperback full |paperback black & white **

After months of hard work the moment is finally there, the release of our new book: vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive! When we started working, or better said, planning an update of the book we never realized the amount of work required. Be aware that this is not a minor update. This book covers HA (full rewrite as HA has been rewritten for 5.0), DRS (mostly rewritten to focus on resource management) and Storage DRS (new!). Besides these three major pillars we also decided to add what we call supporting deepdives. The supporting deepdives added are: vMotion, Storage vMotion, Storage I/O Control and EVC. This resulted in roughly 50% more content (totaling 348 pages) than the previous book, also worth noting that every single diagram has been recreated and are they cool or what?

Before I will give you the full details I want to thanks a couple of people who have helped us tremendously and without whom this publication would not have been possible. First of all I would like to thank my co-author Frank “Mr Visio” Denneman for all his hard work. Frank and I would also like to thank our VMware management team for supporting us on this project. Doug “VEEAM” Hazelman thanks for writing the foreword! A special thanks goes out to our technical reviewers and editors: Doug Baer, Keith Farkas and Elisha Ziskind (HA Engineering), Anne Holler, Irfan Ahmad and Rajesekar Shanmugam (DRS and SDRS Engineering), Puneet Zaroo (VMkernel scheduling), Ali Mashtizadeh and Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin (vMotion and Storage vMotion Engineering), Doug Fawley and Divya Ranganathan (EVC Engineering). Thanks for keeping us honest and contributing to this book.

As promised in the multiple discussions we had around our 4.1 HA/DRS book we wanted to make sure to offer multiple options straight away. While Frank finalized the printed copy I worked on formatting the ebook. Besides the black&white printed version we are also offering a full color version of the book and a Kindle version. The black&white sells for $ 29.95, the full color for $ 49.95 and the Kindle for an ultra cheap price: $ 9.95. Needless to say that we recommend the Kindle version. It is cheap, full color and portable or should we say virtual… who doesn’t love virtual? On a sidenote, we weren’t planning on doing a black and white release but due to the extremely high production costs of the full color print we decided to offer it as an extra service. Before I give the full description here are the direct links to where you can buy the book. (Please note that Amazon hasn’t listed our book yet, seems like an indexing issue, should be resolved soon hopefully For those who cannot wait to order the printed copy check-out Createspace or Comcol.

Amazon:
eBook (Kindle) – $ 9.99 (price might vary based on location as amazon charges extra for delivery)
Black & White Paper – $ 29.95
Full Color Paper – $ 49.95

Createspace:
Black & White Paper – 29.95
Full Color Paper – 49.95

For the EMEA folks comcol.nl offered to distribute it again, paper black & white can be found here, and full color here.

VMware vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive zooms in on three key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a vSphere HA and DRS cluster and to implement Storage DRS. Even more important, it explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA, DRS and Storage DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA, DRS and Storage DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools, Datastore Clusters and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures and fundamental supporting features like vMotion, Storage I/O Control and much more are described in detail for the very first time.

This book is also the ultimate guide to be prepared for any HA, DRS or Storage DRS related question or case study that might be presented during VMware VCDX, VCP and or VCAP exams.

Coverage includes:
– HA node types
– HA isolation detection and response
– HA admission control
– VM Monitoring
– HA and DRS integration
– DRS imbalance algorithm
– Resource Pools
– Impact of reservations and limits
– CPU Resource Scheduling
– Memory Scheduler
– DPM
– Datastore Clusters
– Storage DRS algorithm
– Influencing SDRS recommendations

Be prepared to dive deep!

Pick it up, leave a comment and of course feel free to make those great mugshots again and ping them over via Facebook or our Twitter accounts! For those looking to buy in bulk (> 20) contact clusteringdeepdive@gmail.com.