This is a joint post of three prominent writers in the virtualization community:

Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe and Maish Saidel-Keesing.

For the past 6 months we have been working on a joint project. It has actually been kept pretty quiet, and it is now time to make this public.

Previous VMware vSphere books have focused on how to master the technology, deep-diving into certain elements and giving tips & tricks that help you manage your virtual infrastructure.

But we felt there was something missing in all these books. How to design an infrastructure, accounting for all the elements that you need to consider.  For example:

• What kind of servers should I use?
• Which storage - NFS/iSCSI/FC?
• How to scale an vCenter server appropriately?
• and many more similar questions.

This is how VMware vSphere design was born...

The three of us collaborated on the book, to not only explain how to configure each element of your infrastructure, but to make you think about all the options available, and how each choice can impact the overall design. It should help you find the right solution for your environment – because no “one size fits all”.

It is the only book focused on designing VMware vSphere implementations. It is written for engineers and architects who plan, install, maintain and optimize vSphere solutions.

The book details the overall design process, server hardware selection, network layout, security considerations, storage infrastructure, virtual machine design, and more. We debate the merits of scaling up servers versus scaling out, ESX versus ESXi hypervisors, vSwitches versus dvSwitches, and FC, FCoE, iSCSI or NFS storage. We show you which tools can be used to monitor, to plan, to manage, to deploy and to secure your vSphere landscape. We run through the design decisions that a typical company might face, and question the choices you come to. The book is packed with real-world proven strategies. VMware vSphere Design examines how the virtualization architecture for your company should ideally look – be it a newly deployed environment or an optimization of the existing infrastructure.

The VMware vSphere design is now available for pre-order on Amazon and will be in the stores around the middle of March 2011.

We would like to thank Jason Boche for acting as the technical editor for the book.

We hope you enjoy reading this book, as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Forbes, Scott and Maish.