vSphere Design Best Practices written by Brian Bolander and Christopher Kusek was released on May 26 2014 by Packt Publishing.

The book aims to provide design best practices for deploying and configuring a VMware vSphere environment. It starts with how to approach the planning of vSphere deployment where the authors discuss typical design considerations such as progressing from the conceptual, logical and physical designs.

The chapters are separated logically by major components of a vSphere infrastructure such as, “Storage Design”, “Network Design”, “Virtual Machine Design” etc. Some discussion of application workloads such as Exchange Server and SQL Server are brought up in the section on “Business Critical Applications”. The chapters are easy to follow and could stand alone if you wanted to extract specific information for your reference.

The books also makes reference to VCAP-DCD in it’s introduction though I wouldn’t use this as my primary reference to study for the exam. The main problem I had with the book is that it is simply much too short to get into the depth the most likely target reader looking we be looking for.

The book is most effective if you consider it quick comparison to basic best practices you might already be familiar with. At a brief 126 pages, you will be able to work through it in a few hours, including any relevant notes you may take away. For most in depth discussions you are directed to review VMware white papers where you can get the answers to the questions the chapter will likely leave you with.

The design principles while very condensed, are generally correct and could serve those who may not have much experience with VMware best practices or those ensuring they are keeping up to date in their deployment methods. It’s probably best consumed through a digital copy through the eBook version or via Safari Books Online to get the best value.