Book: VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide

Three years ago two well-known influencers in the virtualization industry, Ron Oglesby (Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services at GlassHouse) and Scott Herold (Lead Architect of Virtualiztion at Quest), published a unique book for all the VMware professionals out there: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

Instead of replicating most of the contents available through (already very good) VMware documentation, these guys collected years of experience on real-world infrastructures, offering a precious collection of best practices and advices to design every aspect of a virtual data center with ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x.

Doing the same for the relatively new VMware Infrastructure 3.x requires some time, to master the products, learn the new rules, build a solid blueprint in designing with the new features and limitations in mind.

So, even if VMware Infrastructure 3 was released 2 years ago, Ron and Scott are back only now, with a new co-author, Mike Laverick (Independent Trainer and Consultant at RTFM Education), and a new book:

  VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide

Release Date: July 30, 2008
ISBN: 0971151083
Edition: 1st
Pages: 700

 

Actually the tome is made by two books, the Design Guide and the Operations Guide:

 

Advanced Technical Design Guide Advanced Operations Design Guide
  • Chapter 1: Virtualization Overview
  • Chapter 2: Virtual Infrastructure Architecture
  • Chapter 3: ESX 3 Implementation
  • Chapter 4: VirtualCenter and Cluster Design
  • Chapter 5: Storage
  • Chapter 6: Network Concepts and Strategies
  • Chapter 7: Virtual Machines and VM Selection
  • Chapter 8: Managing the Environment
  • Chapter 9: Introduction to Security
  • Chapter 10: Recover and Business Continuity
  • Chapter 1: Installing ESX
  • Chapter 2: Networking
  • Chapter 3: Storage
  • Chapter 4: VirtualCenter
  • Chapter 5: Creating and Modifying VMs
  • Chapter 6: Rapid Virtual Machine Deployment
  • Chapter 7: Access Control
  • Chapter 8: Resource Monitoring
  • Chapter 9: Resource Management
  • Chapter 10: VMotion, DRS and HA
  • Chapter 11: Backup and VMware Consolidated Backup
  • Chapter 12: ESX Command Line Configurations
  • Chapter 13: Updating and Patching

 

By the way: Scott Herold will be one of the premiere speakers presenting at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the virtualization.info’s independent conference.

We are almost ready to publish the agenda but here the abstract of his session:

Achieving Optimal Performance from your Virtual Infrastructure through Management and Automation

Server virtualization has brought significant efficiencies to IT operations, but at the cost of new challenges in monitoring the health of virtual machines, analyzing data, alerting staff of incidents and problems, and performing standard and special administrative tasks. These challenges are growing as virtualization takes an increasingly central role in IT, forcing administrators to invest more time and effort into ensuring the proper operation and health of the virtual environment. Join Scott Herold, Lead Architect at Vizioncore, who describes how the growing complexity and lack of resources necessitates changing the way IT operations are commonly performed. Herold offers insight to the tools and strategies that accelerate and automate IT activities to reduce the workload inherent in a virtualization strategy, while also enabling IT professionals to get ahead of the curve and begin a strategy to higher levels of operational maturity.

We are pretty sure that Scott will be more than glad to do some book signing at the end of his session (or while busy at the Quest/Provision Networks and Vizioncore booths during the event).