vSphere Quickstart Guide by the Magnificent Six

Duncan from Yellow-Bricks.com had a dream and in that dream Six great VMware minds would work together as one to help all VMware admins worldwide to build a better virtual infrastructure. Sounds like a fairytale doesn’t it? Well, this is one that isn’t too good to be true. Duncan really succeeded in writing a book together with these top VMware minds that is a Quick Start Guide for all those admins out there that just want to get the job done.

So who are these Magnificent Six? In random order:

• Chad Sakac, he who sleeps with a hard disk for a pillow and eats Glass Fiber for breakfast
• Stu Radnidge well known for his expertise on vSphere in an enterprise environment and for his famous one liners like: “Those <censored> could better be <censored> before they <censored>”
• Alan Renouf, who lives and breathes du belle PowerShell.
• Dave Mishchenko, who can tell you everything about the virtual hardware and builds you a nice whitebox while talking to you.
• Thomas Bryant III despite his age a communities old-timer and known for his overall experience
• And of course Duncan Epping, he who blogs like a tsunami.

This first book in what might become a series of more, is based on the “RapidApp’s Quick Start guide to ESX 3.0” by Ron Oglesby. He was kind enough to make his book available for a rewrite. The vSphere Quick Start guide will not provide you with all the theoretical details that a study book provides, but it takes you by the hand and shows you how to do the job. Duncan was nice enough to give me an early preview of one of the chapters written by Thomas Bryant and I admit that this is a great concept and will be a must-have for your bookshelf at work.

Thomas takes you by the hand through the installation of vCenter and shows you how to add a host or configure VMotion while Alan Renouf throws in the PowerShell code for these actions. Throughout the chapter you’ll find very helpful tips like: “Although most Microsoft ‘best practices’ recommend using Windows Authentication for access, these generally are linked to SQL applications for end users and not necessarily service accounts. SQL Server logins are faster and the account is less likely to be locked out due to a forced password policy GPO.”

The book is nearly finished and they guys are trying to get it published before VMworld 2009. It will have over 200 pages and contains the following chapters: vCenter, Hosts, VMs, Networking, Storage, Security and Powershell Basics. When finished it will be available through http://lulu.com. Stay tuned for more!