Publication Date: August 30, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0321832213 | ISBN-13: 978-0321832214 | Edition: 1

I’m long overdue on book reviews and I need to start off with an apology to the authors for getting this one out so late.  The title 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 unaware of the authors (both in virtualization and cloud gigs at EMC Corporation) but nonetheless meeting new friends in virtualization is always pleasant surprise.  It was written prior to and released at the beginning of September 2012 with vSphere coverage up to version 5.0 which launched early in September 2011.

The book starts off with the first two chapters more or less providing a history of VMware virtualization plus coverage of most of the products and where they fit.  I’ve been working with VMware products since just about the beginning and as such I’ve been fortunate to be able to absorb all of the new technology in iterations as it came over a period of many years.  Summarizing it all in 55 pages felt somewhat overwhelming (this is not by any means a negative critique of the authors’ writing).  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.  I sympathize a bit for late adopters – it really must feel like a fire hose of details to sort through to flesh out a final bill of materials which fits their environment.

From there, 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.  Last but not least is a final section titled Common Acronyms which I’ll unofficially call Chapter 9.  It summarizes and translates acronyms used throughout the book.  I’m not sure if it’s unique but it’s certainly not a bad idea.

To summarize, the book is 286 pages in length, not including the index.  It’s not a technical deepdive 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.  The links above will take you directly to the book on Amazon where you can purchase a paperback copy or Kindle version of the book.  Enjoy and thank you Eric and René-François.

Chapter List

1. From Server Virtualization to Cloud Computing
2. The Evolution of vSphere 5 and its Architectural Components
3. Storage in vSphere 5
4. Servers and Network
5. High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plan
6. Backups in vSphere 5
7. Implementing vSphere 5
8. Managing a Virtualization Project
9. Common Acronyms

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