I’ve been lucky enough to review quite a few books on JFVI , mostly around virtualisation and cloud computing. Some of them have been pretty in-depth , such as Duncan Epping’s and Frank Denneman’s ubiquitous “HA & DRS Deepdive” a.k.a. the Orange Book. The “for Dummies” series places itself unashamedly at the other end of that scale and VMware vSphere for Dummies is no exception. It would be easy to side-line the book for being a beginners book – I think that’s far form the case. As a VMware specialist myself I would agree that there wasn’t anything in the book that came as a huge surprise , but I’m not really in the target market! I think I would still keep a copy handy as a “primer” for people I might be working with who are don’t spend every waking moment with VMware – something I’m finding myself doing more and more these days. Its also something to grab hold of during a brain fade moment to check something you Google or ask on twitter Smile

 

The format of the whole Dummies series is designed about making the technical information easy to consume and relatively jargon free. Its pretty hard to be completely Jargon free in IT but the book does make sure to explain said jargon first. Designing a vSphere based environment is a far from trivial exercise but the book will take you through that first stage of planning , deployment , maintaining and tuning your first environment.

 

The final part of the book is called “the Part of Tens” and consists of 3 chapters entitled  “ Ten Tools to Make vSphere Management Easier.” covering some of the great 3rd party eco system around vSphere (including a quick Dynamic Ops plug- no surprise as Dan works for them !) Its not my personal top 10 , but everyone is different !, “Ten Places to Improve Your vSphere Know-How.” contains a good list of online resources to expand your Virtualisation knowledge – I’ll try not to take any offence at not being directly linked on this one although I am linked from www.vsphere-land.com  ! It would have been good to mention twitter as a resource. The final chapter ”Ten Pro Tips for a Successful vSphere Deployment.” has a few good gems of wisdom to make your virtualisation journey a pleasant one.

 

In Summary , Dan Mitchell and Tom Keegan have produced something I’d recommend as a good starter to Virtualisation – given the good price point at which the Dummies books come in at , its not doing to break the bank either!

 

If you would like to win a copy of the book , then keep an eye out on the vSoup podcast where I’ll be giving away a copy very soon !