The title of the book is VMware vSphere 5 Building a Virtual Datacenter by Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier (Foreword by Chad Sakac and Technical Editor Tom Keegan). This is a book which caught me off guard a little because I was not aware of it.
The book starts off with the first two chapters on providing a history of VMware virtualization plus coverage of most of the products and where they fit. The book is in a summarized form making it good for quick use. Whereas advanced datacenter virtualization was once just a concatenation of vCenter and ESX, the portfolio has literally exploded to a point where design, implementation, and management has gotten fairly complex for IT when juggling all of the parts together.
Then, the authors move on to cover key areas of the virtualized and consolidated datacenter including storage and networking as well as cluster features, backup and disaster recovery (including SRM), and installation methods. In the eighth and final chapter, a case study is looked at in which the second phase of a datacenter consolidation project must be delivered. Finally the last section titled Common Acronyms; it summarizes and translates acronyms used throughout the book.
To summarize, the book is 286 pages in length, without the index. It’s not a technical deep dive which covers everything in the greatest of detail but I do view it as a good starting point which is going to answer a lot of questions for beginners and beyond as well as provide some early guidance along the path of virtualization with vSphere.
Here is the chapter list for you:
- From Server Virtualization to Cloud Computing
- The Evolution of vSphere 5 and its Architectural Components
- Storage in vSphere 5
- Servers and Network
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plan
- Backups in vSphere 5
- Implementing vSphere 5
- Managing a Virtualization Project
- Common Acronyms
