The entire vSphere community (myself included) seems to be in a flutter over the release of the long awaited Host Resources Deep Dive by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort. For me this recently resulted in a tweet-thread to see who had bought the most copies (I lost). The upside to this whole thing is I came across Mr. Ariel Sanchez Mora’s (you should follow him @arielsanchezmor) VMware book list. I love book reviews, so with Ariel’s permission I’m stealing his idea! In fairness you should really go check out his page first, but make sure to come back! Without further ado, here’s the best of my VMware library.

Certification

Like many people, this is where I started. I’d heard horror stories about about the VCP, so after taking Install, Configure, Manage I bought my first book, coincidentally (or not) written by the instructor of my class. I immediately followed it up by adding the second piece to my library.

The Official VCP5 Certification Guide (VMware press) by Bill Ferguson

(Sybex) by Brian Atkinson

I think that in terms of the earlier books, I’d give the edge to the Sybex version. It covers the same fundamentals as the official guide, but goes much deeper.

Just last year while at 2016 I was wandering around the expo floor at VMworld 2016, bumming from failing my VCP6 (it was expected, but disappointing nonetheless), and I walked straight into a book signing for the new VCP6-DCV cert guide. It was destiny or something like that

Here’s the thing with certification guides; the majority of the material doesn’t change from version to version. DRS is DRS is DRS (not really, but the fundamentals are all there). If you’re just getting started, or able to get a hand-me-down version of an earlier version you’ll still be leaps and bounds ahead of folks who haven’t read the books. They can be a good way to get a grasp on the fundamentals if all you’re looking to do is learn. To that end, if you’re goal is to pass the test, you can’t go wrong with picking up an official certification guide. I know the VCP6-DCV guide provided an invaluable refresher for me.

For more on the VCP-DCV, please check out my study resources.

Hands On

Learning PowerCLI (Packt publishing) by Robert van den Nieuwendijk

I didn’t realize until just right now that there was a second edition of this book released in February of this year! Regardless, this book is a great way to get started with PowerCLI, however it’s more of a recipe cookbook than a tutorial. If you need a getting started with PowerShell book, look no further than:

Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches by Donald Jones and Jeffrey Hicks.

This is the guide to get started with PowerShell. Honestly I think the authors should give me commission for how many people I’ve told to go buy this book. It’s not a vSphere book, but if you want to be effective with PowerCLI, this book will help you on your way. It breaks the concept up into small manageable chunks that you can swallow on your daily lunch break.

DevOps for VMware Administrators (VMware press) Trevor Roberts, Josh Atwell, Egle Sigler, Yvovan Doorn

“DevOps” to me is like “the cloud”. It means different things to different people. In this case the book focuses solely on the tools that can be used to help implement the framework that is DevOps. Nonetheless, it’s a great primer into a number of the most popular tools that are implemented to support a DevOps philosophy. If you’re struggling with automation and/or tool selection for your DevOps framework, there are far worse places to start.

Mastery

Mastering VMware vSphere series

The gold standard for learning the basics of vSphere. This title could just as easily appear under the certification section, as it appears on almost every study list. A word of warning, this is not the book to learn about the latest features in a release. That’s what the official documents are for. You may notice that I linked an old version above, and that’s because the latest version was conspicuously missing nearly all of the new features in vSphere 6. That being said, it’s another standard that should be on all bookshelves.

VMware vSphere Design (Sybex) Forbes Gurthrie and Scott Lowe

Age really doesn’t matter with some things, and while that rarely pertains to IT technologies, good design practices never go out of style. This thought provoking book will help you learn how to design your datacenter to be the most effective it can be. I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s in an infrastructure design role, regardless of whether they were working on vSphere or not.

And then on the other hand you have a design book that’s built for a specific purpose and that’s to pass the VCDX. Much of the content is built and delivered specifically for those who are looking to attain this elite certification. This is a good book, but as someone who has no intention of ever going after a VCDX, I expected something a bit less focused on a cert, and a bit more focused on design principles. If unlike me you have VCDX aspirations, you definitely need to go grab a copy.

VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive (Volume 1) Duncan Epping & Frank Denneman

I really don’t care if this was written for a five year old OS or not. If you want to learn about how vSphere makes decisions and how to work with HA/DRS/Storage DRS/Stretched Clusters, this is an essential read. Put on your swimmies because you’re going off the diving board and into the deep end!

I’m just going to go ahead and leave a placeholder here for the aforementioned VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive. Having heard them speak before and read their other works, I expect this book to be nothing less than mind blowing.

If you liked this, please check out my other book reviews.

Thanks for visiting!