Book review

VMWare vSphere 4.1
HA and DRS
technical deepdive

by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman

A coworker recommended last week that we get this book and read through it. He had heard someone else talking about it on a business trip he took.

As the name implies, this is a technical book related to the concepts of HA and DRS inside VMWare. I might have titled it "HA and DRS - technical 'very thorough overview'", because when I hear the word 'deepdive', I think about internals, this book was more about concepts, 'best practices', and practical setup and use of HA and DRS.

The book is kind of smallish, 200 pages with lots of illustrations. One of the things they did throughout the book, that was kind of funny to me, was they kept talking about different setting available to you to change, then they strongly recommended leaving the default. At least they did it in a way that you could understand why to leave the default setting.

Having said that, even with all the things going on this week at work, here it is on Thursday, I got the book on Monday, and I've read it. I found it to be a very good overview of HA and DRS, written so that even the novice with VMWare can pick up the book, read it, and feel like they know what is going on with HA and DRS. We have been running VMWare for five years now in our environment, and are nearly completely virtualized, I would say we have quite a bit of experience in these areas, and there are a few things we need to talk about from this book.

I plan to have everyone on my team read it, and would recommend it to anyone running VMWare in their business environment, whether they are just starting out, or have been running for a while now...