The book I am reviewing is VMware ESXi cookbook written by authors Mohammed Raffic Kajamoideen and Aravind Sivaraman and published by Packt Publishing. It contains 9 chapters totalling 84 pages in e-book version.
Disclaimer
I have received a free e-book copy of this book for reviewing it from Packt Publishing. There are no requirements on my behalf regarding positive reviews or anything like that.
This review consists entirely of my own opinion of the book.
Reviewing the chapters I see a good coverage of the ESXi feature set. Reading the book I found some good examples/use cases for some of the configuration options, one such as example is when to use load balancing policy Source MAC hash. Most chapters really go in-depth is provide tons of practical step by step information on configuring the features.
Great points in the book
- Limiting who can login to DCUI while host is in lockdown mode.
- Using VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service
- Lots of details – even for very small features such as SNMP
Some room left for improvement
- Screenshots for some lessons are from the old vSphere Client while other lessons are from the new vSphere Web Client. I wish they had kept them uniform (vSphere Web Client).
- How to actually use authentication when ESXi host is joined to active directory is missing (group ESX Admins)
- The book mentions default roles in VMware vCenter but lists too many (normal installation there is no default roles called “View” or “Anonymous”)
- Details on how to preventing virtual machine disk shrinking is provided, however this is not even possible on ESXi 5 (http://bit.ly/1jWXFlr)
- While discussing Private VLANs the book unfortunately mixes isolated and community vlan during its explanation of the terms.
For many system administrators the book should be useful to look up how to perform various tasks.
Overall I enjoyed the VMware ESXi Cookbook, but felt at times that the attention to detail I so enjoyed in some chapters seemed lacking in others.