Just after I joined Zettagrid in June of 2013 I decided to load up vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman on my iPad to read on my train journey to and from work. Reading that book allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of vSphere through the in depth content that Duncan and Frank had produced. Any VMware administrator worth their salt would be familiar with the book (or the ones that proceeded it) and it’s still a brilliant read.

Fast forward a few versions of vSphere and we finally have follow up:

This time around Frank has been joined by Niels Hagoort and together they have produced another must have virtualization book…though it goes far beyond VMware virtualization. I was lucky enough to review a couple of chapters of the book and I can say without question that this book will make your brain hurt…but in a good way. It’s the deepest of deep dives and it goes beyond the previous books best practice and dives into a lot of the low level compute, storage and networking fundamentals that a lot of us have either forgotten about, never learnt or never bothered to learn about.

This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, which enables you to:

Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.

Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.

How the 3-DIMMs per Channel configuration results in a 10-20% performance drop.

How TLB works and why it is bad to disable large pages in virtualized environments.

Why 3D XPoint is perfect for the vSAN caching tier.

What queues are and where they live inside the end-to-end storage data paths.

Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.

Why Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit significantly boosts packet processing performance.

If any of you have read Frank’s NUMA Deep Dive blog series you will start to get an appreciation of the level of technical detail this book covers, however it is written in a way that allows you absorb the information in a way that is digestible, though some parts may need to be read twice over. Well done to Frank and Niels on getting this book out and again, if you are working in and around anything to do with computers this is a must read so do yourself a favour and grab a copy.

The current Amazon locals that have access to purchase the book can be found below:

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1540873064

Amazon France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/1540873064

Amazon Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/1540873064

Amazon India: http://www.amazon.in/dp/1540873064

Amazon Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/1540873064

Amazon Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/1540873064

Amazon Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/1540873064

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1540873064

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