Networking for VMware Administrators: Book Review

I was fortunate enough to receive a preview copy of Networking forVMware Administrators, so bear that in mind when reading this review. However, I found it to be such a useful source of information that I would more than happily purchase my own copy. Having arrived at VMware virtualisation a few years ago from a background in Enterprise IT, this is a book I wish had been available back then.

The book takes the approach of giving the VMware team enough information about networking to be able to have a productive conversation with the network team and vice-versa for virtualisation based networking conversations with the VMware team. Often times these can be difficult conversations if one or both parties is not familiar with the requirements and challenges of the other team’s specialist areas.

Back in the day when I first started with virtualisation all of a sudden I needed to know about virtual switches, VLANs, CDP, network security requirements etc, having previously only needed to patch a few cables in, some basic TCPIP and firewalling, and some networking stuff around Microsoft Clustering and NLB. This book will provide you with all of the info for those conversations with some excellent practical examples of each topic.

More than that though, throughout the book the authors will pitch in with design elements of virtual networking to give you more background and insight into why to do things in a certain way, not just how. This is followed up with excellent design based chapters at the end of the book covering different scenarios based on how many and what speed nics are available in each compute device which I’m sure I’ll be referring back to.

I also found the chapters on Storage based networking (covering both iSCSI and NFS) great, since having spent the early part of my virtualisation experience with Fibre Channel storage a recent foray into the world of NFS for vSphere was a different challenge. Again, armed in advance with the knowledge from this book would set you well down the path of designing virtual networking for storage.

The book has an enjoyable reading style with the authors’ humour filtering through well, which sometimes isn’t always the case with tech books since tech publishers seem to think that the dryer a book the better. It’s a no brainer to me that you’ll learn more from a book if its a pleasure to read and you can empathise with some of the authors own experiences which I did with this book and some of their practical tales.

I did skip some of the content in the early chapters on general networking info, however not as much as I was expecting to since I found the content filled in some gaps in my basic network knowledge, often around the why rather than the how.

In summary if you work in any way with a vSphere environment then I think you would gain knowledge from this book.