Book Review: VMware vSphere Troubleshooting PACKT Publishing

I am a big fan of PACKT Publishing books, I have quite a few. So I thought I would start writing reviews on them.

I just bought this one, one thing I like is that you get the pdf instantly and the physical copy comes in about 5 days. So I can access it instantly while waiting for my physical copy to turn up.

I have read through most of it, it is split up into the following chapters:

1. The Methodology of Problem Solving
2. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM Performance
3. Troubleshooting Clusters
4. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Networking
5. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage
6. Advanced Troubleshooting of vCenter Server and vSphere Hosts
7. Appendix A: Learning PowerGUI Basics
8. Appendix B: Installing VMware vRealize Operations Manager
9. Appendix C: Power CLI – A Basic Reference

What I liked about the book, was that it went into vSphere 6, there isn’t much out there currently that goes into it well.

In Chapter 6 there are sections based on the whole issue of certificates, since this can be handled by the v6 VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA).

Also chapter 1 was interesting and it was nice to have a concise overview of how to problem solve. Something I feel can be overlooked easily.

A lot of stuff you may already know, esp if you are already an Admin or have done any of the VCAPs, such as troubleshooting PVLANs and LUN masking.

One of the downsides which is my own personal opinion, was that it focused a lot on the vMA (vSphere Management Assistant). I never use this really, and the only time I used it in any depth was while studying for the VCAP5-DCA. It went in depth into it and the commands you could use, and when they wanted to show something being done via the command line, it was nearly always from the vMA.

Now if you use the vMA often, you’ll probably see this as a plus point!

It isn’t an essential book for your shelf but it definitely has value, I learned a few things from it, such as repairing the dvsdata.db file on a host that is part of a vSphere Distributed Switch and it refreshed me in a few areas.