VMware creates a new book on business continuity and disaster recovery

Rather than simply publishing white papers, VMware evidently is now taking on the new challenge of publishing books around their technology under the “vmbooks” label.

Similar in nature to IBM Redbooks, VMware’s first entry under the vmbooks offering is a well-written and very informative 232-page book titled, “A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure.” And best of all, the book is available as a free download from VMware.

The book features hardware and software solutions from AMD, Cisco, Dell, Emulex, Intel, NetApp, and Sun Microsystems.

And while VMware has been pushing Microsoft’s Powershell as of late, this book talks about and contains scripting examples using PERL. PERL has been around for a long time within the ESX environment, so it wasn’t a surprise to find it used as the scripting language. It was interesting, however, to not find similar examples in the book using Powershell.

All in all, I believe this was a very successful start to the vmbook series, and I look forward to VMware sharing more information like this with the community in the near future.

So why read this book? VMware writes:

“Unlike white papers, which merely provide analysis and prescriptive advice, this VMbook provides a step-by-step process for implementing VMware Infrastructure as a cost-effective BCDR solution to support the most common business continuity scenarios, including disaster recovery. The BCDR solution also provides instruction on how to fail back services to the designated primary datacenter after a scheduled test or business service interruption.

By following the guidelines in this VMbook, you will be able to achieve the following objectives:

• Create a scalable, fault-tolerant and highly available BCDR solution. This VMbook demonstrates how to utilize VMware Infrastructure for both server- and desktop-based virtual machines that support both scheduled BCDR testing, as well as unplanned disaster events.
• Demonstrate the viability of virtualization-based BCDR. VMware provides customer proven solutions that are designed to meet the availability needs of the most demanding datacenters. This VMbook will help you demonstrate the viability of using VMware solutions for BCDR in both testing and production environments while continuing to leverage existing tools, processes and policies.
• Reduce resistance to change and mitigate “fear of the unknown.” Virtualization is becoming ubiquitous, and this VMbook will help you demonstrate the straightforward and undisruptive nature of managing availability with VMware Infrastructure so that you can overcome resistance to change and dispel common myths and misconceptions about virtualization.”

Download this free book from VMware, and hopefully we’ll see more books like it from the company soon enough. After you’ve read it, feel free to send VMware your feedback: vmbookfeedback@vmware.com.