My copy of “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4” arrived yesterday as a result of the mini twitter competition I won a few weeks back.

Its one of the smaller volumes (just over 100 pages ) on my Virtualistion Bookshelf , but size most defiantly isn’t everything. Especialy when you look at the calibre of its authors. John Arrasjid (@vcdx001 ) , Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) and Steve Kaplan (@roidude) are all very well known in the VMWare community for the quality of their whitepapers , blogs and even comics!

The book isn’t designed to give you a how-to form start to finish of building your own cloud solution but it is a fantastic overview , starting off with the Virtualisation basics , essentially the “what” , “why” and “how” of Virtualisation at a reasonably high level. Common use cases for virtualisation are covered from branch office , to server consolidation and test labs.

The book then focuses a little onĀ  how various products form VMware can fit into the environment , what benefits they bring and a very brief description of how they are deployed.

A virtual infrastructure is not much without workloads to put on it , so a whole chapter is devoted to methodologies and approaches to moving your existing workloads from physical or legacy virtual environments into your VMware vSphere 4 environment. Once those workloads are in place, the book covers some of the things to look for when optimising that environment be it via resource pools or additional vSphere 4 features such as DRS. High availability , Disaster recovery and Security are also covered. The final chapter coveres VMWare View , the Virtual Desktop component of vSphere 4.

That’s a lot to cover in 100 pages , but I felt thats the book achieves what it sets out to do , and thats give someone a good foundation in vSphere 4.It would be an excellent aid to explaining to colleagues and managers what we can and what we can’t do with our environment. Its going to stay within arms reach of my keyboard , ready to pass to anyone interested in virtualisation for a good time to come!

If you’d like to obtain a copy for yourself ( though yours won’t be signed like mine is ! ) then you can do so from here:

http://www.sage.org/pubs/21_vSphere4/


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