I was very excited when I saw this book. I did not know the author, but I certainly knew of the subject area. Knew enough in fact, to be nervous of it! So I was very excited when I got the book actually in my hand - now I could learn more about troubleshooting one of the most common reasons for performance issues in vSphere.
Mike Preston has I think, a great deal of experience around vSphere storage, and it comes through in his book about troubleshooting. Not sure if he has gray hair or not, but I suspect much of his learning has come from trying to solve real problems. It comes through clearly in his book that he is trying to teach us to be better at troubleshooting vSphere storage issues. In addition he starts at the beginning where he talks about what are all the components of vSphere storage are and how they work together. This means he talks of disk, and naming, and than vSphere Pluggable Storage Architecture. So if we look at it in acronyms, we have NAA, T10, MPX, MPP, NMP, and PSA. But all of those and more are explained clearly. From the components, he moves to talk about the tools we might use for troubleshooting. Than we dive into troubleshooting chapters that include: Storage Visibility, Contention, and Capacity / Overcommitment. The appendix has a lot of value as well - actual troubleshooting steps, esxtop usage info as well as iSCSI error codes.
I really liked the different commands that were explained in the text that I could try out. Some were which logs to look at and the example search command lines for them, but also commands I had not seen like NC, and specific help using esxtop.
This is a short review but I hope it is clear I learned a lot. Easy to read, lots of examples for me to try in my lab, and ideas I can use for my next troubleshooting adventure. So thanks very much Mike!
I have purchased the hard-copy of this book for this review, and I ended up by purchasing an ebook of it for my iPad so I can have it handy when I travel. So definitely worth the money - if you want to learn more about troubleshooting vSphere storage issues, this is the book to empower you!
Michael
