Review: Virtualization Changes Everything (Must Read for Beginners)

VMware Storage Strategies

To solve VMware storage problems, you need to understand how virtualization uses your storage, right?

And, to design a robust new vSphere from the ground up, you need a great storage strategy, right?

This book can help with both cases…and more.

Vaughn Stewart and Michael Slisinger have shared their experiences and knowledge about VMware datastores and storage strategies in a book called, Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere and Cloud Computing.

About The Book…

Vaughn and Michael did a superb job writing this book (lots of details, terms, and examples).

For VMware Beginners, it’s a wealth of technical information which ranges from creating the basic VMware datastores, all the way to the nuts and bolts of designing a high-performance shared storage platform.

The book discusses how Vaughn and Michael view storage as a vital piece in the support of virtualization and cloud computing – and how storage architecture is dynamically evolving.

On this point, I completely agree because – I too – have experienced these changes first hand over the last five years.

Vaughn and Michael share their view on how storage is often overlooked as an important component of the data center and then later realized after the problems begin.

They also point out the obvious, “without storage there is no data, and without data, there is no cloud.”

This point is well made, and once again I agree.

In my own experience, my team and I have spent many tireless hours working with the storage engineers to re-engineer the way the SAN was carved out at the disk level with an incorrect amount of disk spindles to provide enough performance, as well as fixing LUNs that were provisioned too small. Both cases impacted the VMware datastore.

One storage problem I had to work through was a storage admin who was making 6 drive – disk parody groups, and then carving them back into 56GB LUNs, and then joining 6 LUNs into a LUCE (extent) to make a 300GB LUN. This was insane and I couldn’t get him to stop doing this!

A Must-Read for Beginners!

In Virtualization Changes Everything, Vaughn Stewart and Mike Slisinger examine storage and break it down into easy to consume key topics. Great for beginners to get their minds wrapped around this important topic.

They look at how the VMware datastore, hypervisor host, virtualization technology, and cloud computing have all played an almost evolutionary role in changing IT.

Below are screenshots of the topics they write about, my favorite is chapter 5.

Samples of the Table of Contents:

ToC Sample 2

This screenshot of the table of contents shows some very important topics that every storage engineer should know.

The topics covered in chapter 5 are my favorites:

A New Way of Managing Storage

Vaughn and Michael explain why breaking up outdated storage silos into a dynamic, flexible hosting environment, is a better storage design.

Take note! This is a key factor for anyone starting off as a storage administrator.

Addressing Common Storage Goals and Challenges

The book goes into further detail and reviews common goals and challenges associated with providing storage services for cloud computing.

I’ve been there and understand the complexity of adding, expanding, removing storage on a server built in the cloud – it can be tricky!

Vaughn and Michael address each topic and dive deep into advanced storage technologies designed to scale and support the ever-changing, and ever-expanding, storage needs of the future.

Who Should Read this Book?

The examples in Virtualization Changes Everything is pulled from Vaughn and Michael’s real-world experiences, and often overlap and integrate with other complicated technologies.

I admit, there is almost too much information in the book about storage, but it is a perfect guidebook for the storage engineer who needs to update his/her storage strategies, or for the new VMware administrator who is just getting started.

And finally, any manager or person who wants to understand what’s going on with storage…

Why do I recommend this book?

As a vitalization professional, I learned a few new storage strategies to improve: high availability, efficiency, integration, and performance. All perfect for architecting the best storage solution for the cloud.

Get your copy of Virtualization Changes Everything on Amazon.

About the Authors:

• Vaughn Stewart, LinkedIn Profile
• Michael Slisinger, Linkedin Profile

If you enjoyed this review of Virtualization Changes Everything then I recommend you also read my The Docker Book Review.