virtualization.info

A few weeks ago the well known virtualization expert and author Mike Laverick decided to offer for free its first book about VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0.

The 298-pages book is available online at Lulu (you pay only if you want a printed copy).

While it’s true that VMware just released SRM 4.0 (which should be 2.0), the book is certainly worth a read, at least to have an independent point of view on the product before adopting it.

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager covers everything about the implementation and has a couple of interesting additional chapters, the first one on the LeftHand Networks Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), that Laverick used for his research, and the last one on how to do site recovery without VMware SRM.

Labels: Books, Disaster Recovery, VMware

At the end of August, Sybex published the first book authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead at ePlus Technology, and one of the most popular experts in the virtualization community.
His must-read website has been named Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info and he even presented as speaker at our own Virtualization Congress 2009.

Scott’s book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4, is a generous 700-pages tome that gives a lot about planning, installing and configuring the newest VMware virtualization platform.

One of the biggest challenges in writing a technical book about a product like this one, is writing something that can complement the official documentation and that is worth reading. And it may be a real hard challenge when the product documentation is as rich and extensive as the VMware’s one. 
This book accomplished the task by including tangible proofs of the Scott’s first hand experience in many chapters (mostly the ones about planning).
It’s not an architectural reference guide, it’s not meant to be, but it still provides guidance.

The heart of this book are Chapter 5, Creating and Managing Virtual Networks, and Chapter 6, Creating and Managing Storage Devices.
Both cover very complex and critical aspects of the virtual data center and both are amazingly extended beyond vSphere.
Chapter 5 for example includes a section dedicated to the installation and configuration of the first virtual switch for vSphere: the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Chapter 6 instead…Well, Chapter 6 is almost an entire book about storage. Alone, it is worth considering Mastering VMware vSphere 4, even if the reader already has other manuals on the subject.
This chapter was authored by Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, another top virtualization blogger included in our 2008 nomination.
If the reader has a limited knowledge of enterprise storage, well before a limited understanding of how vSphere uses and manipulates storage arrays, this 100-pages chapter includes an exceptional primer.

Like for every great product there’s always room for improvements.

In same parts, mostly in the initial chapters, the absolute beginners may find themselves a little confused because the book makes some assumption about the readers knowledge about the VMware world. Of course this is not “Introduction to Virtualization and VMware” so it’s completely acceptable.

More than that, some chapters may be greatly extended, like Chapter 13, Securing VMware vSphere, and Chapter 14, Automating VMware vSphere. When the book spoils the reader with Chapter 5 and 6, then the reader expect the same level of in-depth analysis everywhere, and mostly about critical topics like security and automation.

Hopefully, Sybex will work on a bigger and better second edition soon.
Meanwhile Mastering VMware vSphere 4 is a book that any VMware administrator should consider for his bookshelf.
You can check it at the virtualization.info Bookstore (powered by Amazon) or directly at Amazon.com

Labels: Books, Reviews, VMware

vSphere 4.0 is out and the virtualization.info Bookstore is getting filled with fresh new books about it, but the large majority of VMware customers are still on VI 3.x, so they should be happy to know that one of the bestseller about this platform is now available for free.

The book is VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide, written by Scott Herold (Lead Architect, Virtualization, Quest), Ron Oglesby (Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, Dell) and Mike Laverick (the man behind RTMF Education).

On his popular blog Mike announces the availability of the book for free and offers a couple of additional chapters for free as well.

Download everything here:

• VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide
• Quick Start Guide to ESX3i
• Upgrade Guide to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

Labels: Books, VMware

VMware just released a very useful, 54-pages free ebook that collects many the principal guidelines to optimize the performance of the new vSphere: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

It includes four chapters:

• Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere
• ESX and Virtual Machines
• Guest Operating Systems
• Virtual Infrastructure Management

If you are planning a migration to the new platform this is a highly recommended reading.

Labels: Books, VMware

With much irony, now that Microsoft is about to release Hyper-V R2, its Press department finally releases the Resource Kit for Hyper-V 1.0 (or better Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V).

The 750-pages book was written by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone, who already authored the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit.
The former comes from Microsoft Consulting Services, the latter is a former Microsoft Premier Support Engineer.

The book has been included in the virtualization.info Bookstore (which is powered by Amazon).

Labels: Books, Microsoft

Microsoft just released an introductory book about its virtualization products for free:

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (From the Desktop to the Datacenter) Mitch Tulloch (with the Microsoft Virtualization Team) ISBN: 9780735693371 452 pages

The book covers Hyper-V 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, App-V (formerly Softricity SoftGrid), Terminal Services, MED-V (formerly Kidaro Managed Workspace), Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit and even the technologies that Microsoft is trying to market as profile virtualization: User Profiles, Folder Redirection and Offline Files.

Some chapters are very basic (for example the one about MED-V) while others are pretty detailed (like the ones about Hyper-V and SCVMM).
Overall, this book is without doubts the best overview available today to understand the Microsoft virtualization offering.
If you are evaluating the adoption of one of the products above it deserves a read.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Labels: Books, Microsoft

As part of a creative marketing effort Sun and AMD are offering for free the book Virtualization for Dummies, written by Bernard Golden and Clark Scheffy and published by Wiley this year.

The 50-pages book (six chapters) is a special edition with some modifications at design and content level. For example the second chapter is totally dedicated to AMD-V CPU extension, the third chapter introduces to the AMD nested page tables technology Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and its I/O virtualization efforts, and the fifth chapter describes the entire virtualization portfolio that Sun just announced.

Overall it’s worth a look if you are real virtualization newcomers.

Labels: Books