Low Cost Lab Book Progress

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Monday, 09 February 2009 16:19

I thought that it would be a good idea to post an update on my progress of the book/whitepaper/guide that I am writing on building a low cost VI lab. Life has been very busy in the past couple of weeks. I have therefore not been able to post a lot of articles to this site. I normally make a note of interesting things I find and then blog on them the same day. Lately I've been so busy (and on holiday last week I must add) that when I finally decide to blog on them, it's old news and not worth blogging over again. Most things are covered by Scott Lowe, Mike Laverick, Jason Boche and other top bloggers anyway.

For now I've decided to concentrate on the low cost lab book. Writing the book is taking longer that what I first anticipated because I'm doing a lot more testing than what I first thought would be necessary. But this is a good thing, as it's against my beliefs to state anything technical as facts if not tested. I don't like theories, I like facts. To also make sure that everything in the book is as true and accurate as possible, I will be passing it to a couple of peers for a peer review before it's released for download, so please bear with me.

Originally I only wanted to write a proper blog post on "Building a low cost VI lab", but I soon realised that it would be too much to fit in a single blog post, so I thought I could write a document on it. Now it's turned into a little book, rather than just a document. Most of the easy stuff is done, including hardware options and ESX installation and configuration options for non-HCL hardware and basic network configuration tasks. I've also completed most of the storage and shared storage sections of the book, but I've now turned my attention to fine-tuning iSCSI. I will then focus on advanced network configurations, like setting up secure hosting with DMZ configurations using cheap non-managed switches.

I have also decided to include service console commands for every change made within the VI Client. Also, as the whole point of the book is to illustrate a "low cost lab", I will cover configurations for both ESX 3.5 as well as ESXi 3.5 installable.

I'm just fighting the urge to start on the ESX 4 version, but I think it's best to finish this one for ESX 3.5 first. I don't really want to say "THIS BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE ON SO AND SO DATE", but I don't like making promises that I can't keep. I do however thing the end of Feb should be a good time for the peers to have their review of the book. And yes, you will be able to download a free, full version of the book.

Thank you for your patience, I'll keep you posted.