As I have stated before I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would write another review on one of the many books I own from them.
This book is by far one of the best books on VMware vSphere Design that is available, it was one of the key books in my study towards the VCAP5-DCD and it was one of the main reasons I passed the exam.
It is broken down into multiple chapters:
- The Virtual Datacenter
- The Discovery Process
- The Design Factors
- The vSphere Management Design
- The vSphere Storage Design
- The vSphere Network Design
- The vSphere Compute Design
- The vSphere Physical Design
- The Virtual Machine Design
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
- The Design Documentation
It basically covers everything in my opinion you would need to pass the DCD exam, and learn some cool stuff along the way!
If you use this for your 5.5 DCD just bare in mind when it discusses vSphere dependencies it has the order for 5.1 not 5.5. Please remember that it changed in 5.5!
Reading through the chapters, everything is explained in great deal about each part of the design process, and the things you need to look out for and the calculations you need to use. There are detailed breakdowns on the calculations, which I found amazing! I find the calculations the biggest pain!
Little details like IOPs of different types of drives to vCenter requirements to how to collect performance data etc, are all in the book, so you don’t need to go searching else where for info to compliment the book. Everything you need is all in there!
I originally bought the eBook, but I liked the book so much and valued it that highly I bought myself the physical copy. As I believe it belongs on every VM admins/designers bookshelf .
The book is very easy to read and pick up, page 19 discusses the DCD exam, and has some good links to follow but it mentions aspects for the 5.1 DCD and not the 5.5 DCD.
A lot of people in the Google+ DCD group bought this book after my recommendation and they have not been disappointed.
I still refer to it often, when I need to confirm something, or verify some calculations.
The main downside is that, some of the info is geared towards 5.1, but there isn’t much and the rest of the info is valid across the board!
Apart from that this book is an absolute must, just as much as Chris Wahls VMware Networking book is, and that is very high praise if you ask me!
The reason I like both these books sooo much, is because they get straight to the point, providing you with the key information, in a way that is engaging and easy to digest and understand.
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