VMware: Some good readings

This is a bit different post, infact it's not something that will help you solve "things" but its a suggestion of good VMware ESXi related books I would like to share with you.

Lately I'm deeply involved in VMware projects. I  always have been fascinated by VMware products, in particular by vSphere because it's a rock solid hypervisor that is pretty easy to install and configure and besides it offers a LOT of possibilities.
You can consider vSphere as the first brick of your "virtualization house" upon which you can add other bricks that incredibly expands vSphere capabilities. For example you can add the Horizon Suite that brings Desktop Virtualization benefits to your enterprise, or you can add the vCloud "brick" that bring your datacenter and move it to the cloud allowing you to aggregate computing resources from all of your datacenters even if they are geographically dispersed and opens it to new Organizations allowing you to provide VMs for Organizations creating a public cloud infrastructure.
So...I spent last months introducing VMware products to a lot of new customers and then recreating their datacenters moving them from physical world to the virtual world (or "vWorld" as VMware-fanboys would say).

This process brought a lot of effort in constant documenting about what are the best practices and the "gold rules" for the modern datacenters. I consumed a lot of reading material and in this post I would like to briefly discuss it with you.

Starting from the basics I found two really interesting books: VCP5: VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5: VCP-510: Exam VCP-510 - Brian Atkinson which is a book dedicated to VCP certification. It covers all the basics aspects of VMware vSphere and it's a great start point. Another good book, but in my opinion not good as the former, is The Official Vcp5 Study Guide - Bill Ferguson. This book also covers all VCP materials based literally on exam blueprint but I think it does cover it in a not-so-well-organized-way because when I say "literally" it is...content is not so linear as in the former book but it could also be a great reading.

Another great book that is beyond VCP scope is Mastering VMware vSphere 5 - Scott Lowe that covers pretty everything vSphere concerned in a quite detailed way.

Last book I would recommend is for those who likes deepdiving, a book that really fascinates me,VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive - Duncan Epping which interely covers VMware HA explaining how this feature works giving great detailed schemes and pointing also out some differences from HA implemented in ESXi 5.1 with ones implemented in previous releases.

That's all!!