FREE vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive E-Book

In June of this year, Frank and I published the vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive, and the community was buzzing. Twitter exploded, and many community members provided rave reviews.

This excitement caught Rubriks attention, and they decided to support the community by giving away 2000 free copies of the printed version at VMworld. The interest was overwhelming, before the end of the second signing session in Barcelona we ran out of books.

A lot of people reached out to Rubrik and us to find out if they could get a free book as well. This gave us an idea, and we sat down with Rubrik and the VMUG organization to determine how to cater the community.

We are proud to announce that you can download the e-book version (PDF only) for free at rubrik.com. Just sign up and download your full e-book copy here.

 

Spread the word! And if you like, thank @Rubrik and @myVMUG for their efforts to help the VMware community advance.

 

A quick impression of the buzz at the Rubrik booth at VMworld:

Read More

Host Resources Deep Dive Released!

The time has finally come that we published our (e)book. It is available via Amazon using the following links:

Paperback Kindle (ebook)
Amazon US Amazon US 
Amazon DE Amazon DE
Amazon Mexico Amazon NL
Amazon UK Amazon UK
 Amazon Japan Amazon Japan
 Amazon India Amazon India

 

Countless hours, weeks, months has gone into this project. It all began in the beginning of 2016. Frank and I had a lot of discussions about consistent performance and how to optimize while keeping consolidation ratios in mind. At the time, I was working on a NFV platform that was plotted on a virtual datacenter and Frank was working on his epic NUMA content. It all led to the idea of writing down our findings in a book.

It is almost like going against the current; we were looking into ESXi host behaviour, while the world is advancing to higher services running on top of vSphere. Why even bother about the hypervisor? It is all commodity after all, right? Well… not per se. It is all about understanding what you are doing on each level, not about just throwing hardware at a performance/capacity requirement. We began to talk about our ideas to our peers to see if they were interesting and feasible to include in a book.

We quickly came to the conclusion that there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to tuning your virtual environment to accompany distributed services like vSAN and NSX, latency sensitive workloads and right-sizing your VMs in general. We hope our book will help vSphere administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

I am extremely grateful that I was part of realising this book. It is really inspiring to work closely with Frank. He has a tremendous way of expressing his train of thought and has a lot of experience in creating tech books. Our discussions about tech or general topics are always a blast.

All our effort led to our (and my first) publishing which contains:

  • 122.543 words
  • 5217 paragraphs
  • 23 chapters
  • 569 pages
  • 311 screenshots and diagrams

The main challenge was to dig deep in the world of host resources while working a very busy day job at my beloved customers. The effort required was immense. Think a VCDX path times 10. At least, that is how it felt to me. But it was so much fun. I remember a few weeks ago; We were working on the last storage content until deep into the night, like we did almost every day for the last few months, and we were still so psyched at 3.30AM. So even after a very intense period, we still got the kicks out of talking about the content and book in the middle of the night!

We tried to keep the price as low as possible to allow everybody interested in it to be able to buy it. We feel we managed to do that even though the book contains 569 pages. The digital book will following after some PTO and both VMworlds.

As discussed in a previous post; We attended several VMUGs to talk about content included in the book. We are now also confirmed to have a ‘part deux’ of last years VMworld top 10 session this year in Las Vegas and in Barcelona (session 1872). We really look forward seeing you there! Please let us know your thoughts on our book, even write a review on Amazon if you will. It is very rewarding to hear it helped you in some way. Thanks!

Read More

Datanauts: Diving Deep Into vSphere Host Resources

Last week Frank and I had the pleasure and honor to join Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks in their awesome Datanauts podcast!

We discussed our upcoming book and the rationale behind it. After that we thoroughly discussed some topics on CPU architecture and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).

Don’t miss out and listen in on this and other amazing Datanauts podcasts:

Be sure to follow these accounts to get the latest updates about the book.

Twitter: @HostDeepDive
Facebook: HostDeepDive

 

Read More

VMUGs and VMworlds

While being extremely busy to complete our upcoming book, Frank and I are planning to deliver our vSphere 6.5 : Host Resources Deep Dive sessions at several VMUG’s. Just last week we had a blast presenting some Compute and Networking content at one of the largest UserCon VMUGs in the world, the NLVMUG. It was one of the best VMUG UserCons I have ever visited. I do love these days as you really get to connect with your peers and share knowledge and experiences! You can’t afford to miss your local VMUG.

It was very good to see that our room was packed! We got loads of positive feedback which is always nice. It is pretty rewarding to see that the VMware community is taking great interest in our content which is basically about the VMware vSphere layer and how host resources are consumed in ESXi 6.5. To give you some impressions of our session last week, check the pictures below:



After thoroughly enjoying the NLVMUG day, we were on the lookout to attend more VMUGs. So, after having contact with several VMUG leaders, it looks like we are presenting at the following VMUGs:

  • Belgium VMUG in Mechelen, 12th of May  (Didn’t work out planning-wise)
  • German VMUG in Frankfurt, 14th of June
  • UK VMUG in London, 22nd of June

If everything follows through, it will be a very good way to meet up with even more people. Be sure to mark these dates your agenda’s, the listed VMUGs are going to be epic!

VMworld 2017

In other news, we also submitted a session for both VMworld US and EMEA 2017. It will be a sequel to our VMworld 2016 top 10 session. Keep an eye out for session ID 1872vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive : Part 2.

We will get the book done long before VMworld, so we are really excited to see the reactions on it. We are working effortlessly, as are our reviewers, to get create a book that can help everybody working with virtual datacenters in their daily job!

Hope to see you at a VMUG or at a VMworld conference!

Read More