Six month ago there were only few VMware vSphere 6.7 books, but fortunately now there is a better offer with also some good and valuable resources.

I’ve already wrote about the new edition of Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7, now I would like to write some comments about the VMware vSphere 6.7 Data Center Design Cookbook – Third Edition book released on March 2019 and written by Mike Brown and Hersey Cartwright.

You probably know Mike Brown from the Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7 (and the previous editions) book, but this is not the same author.

This new book uses proven infrastructure design principles and applies them to VMware vSphere 6.7 virtual data center design through short and focused recipes on each design aspect. The second edition of this book focused on vSphere 6.0. vSphere features released since then necessitate an updated design guide, which includes recipes for upgrading to 6.7, vCenter HA; operational improvements; cutting-edge, high-performance storage access such as RDMA and Pmem; security features such as encrypted vMotion and VM-level encryption; Proactive HA; HA Orchestrated Restart; Predictive DRS; and more.

Compared with other books, this will also focused on those key topics:

• Identify key factors related to a vSphere design
• Mitigate security risks and meet compliance requirements in a vSphere design
• Create a vSphere conceptual design by identifying technical and business requirements
• Design for performance, availability, recoverability, manageability, and security
• Map the logical resource design into the physical vSphere design
• Create professional vSphere design documentation

Chapter 2 give some interesting tips on how perform the discovery process of an existing environment and the most interesting part is on how use the The VMware Optimization Assessment (VOA) tool.

Then from Chapter 3 through Chapter 10 there are a lot of useful tips on how manage your design process. This part could really helpful for people involved in design but also in the VCDX certification path.

By the end of the book, you will be able to achieve enhanced compute, storage, network, and management capabilities for your virtual data center.

The final chapter is about the documentation part, providing other tips on how write good documents for your project.

The pity of this book is that it’s not long enough as you probably want… There are a lot of information, but some of them deserve maybe more space (of course there are also some other books).

And of course it cannot cover specific vSphere 6.7U2 features, at least not in this edition.

The nice aspect is that it provides very valuable information and most of them are not covered at all on other existing books.

And until the end of April you can buy the ebook at only 10$.

After that provably Amazon can provide a better deal.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.