Recently Chris Wahl, VCDX #104, along with Steve Pantol released Networking for VMware Administrators. This book covered off many aspects of networking in a VMware environment.
The book starts out with fundamental network topics. This is a good sounding board for many VMware administrators. Traditionally (and you could even argue to this current day) there are many environments that work in silos. This has lead to network teams doing networking (down to the vSwitch), server team building a VMware infrastructure leaving application teams riding on top. Now that the worlds are slowly merging it is time for everyone to refresh the basics and this serves it well.
My background is data centre networking. I’ve cut my teeth on Nexus, ASA, SRX and other DC products. Where my weakness lied was in the vSwitch and virtual networking and the design considerations around it. This book provided me with additional considerations when dealing with storage networks, VMkernel interfaces and insights into why. This was good because it made me thing about my decisions. In a virtual environment, getting it right is important when you want to scale in your environment.
Chapters 12 and 13 proved extremely valuable. Titled vSwitch Design and Distributed vSwitch Design they give the reader real work discussion on deploying these technologies with validated real world experience behind it. Working with Ethernet storage was great for me too. I get compute and network virtualisation and I spend my day working with VMware NSX but when it comes to storage I defer to others. I learn that building storage networks isn’t as scary as I made it out to be and the design considerations were helpful.
I think this book is great reference for new and old network and server virtualisation administrators. There are always tid bits you forget or miss and this books rounds them off nicely. Whilst there is a fair amount of introductory topic the book is worth it for the design considerations. Good job Chris and Steve.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from Pearson Publishing / VMware Press. I was not asked for a review or any favourable mention. See my post here for more information.
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