This newly published book is a second edition of VMware vSphere Design. The Authors Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie were joined by Kendrick Coleman for a detailed chapter on vCloud Director which is part of the book. The news has been here for several days and many bloggers has already covered this during this week, but I think that this book desires a special attention and needs a special treatment.
The technical editor as for the 1st edition, was Jason Boche. The first edition VMware vSphere design was coauthored with Maish Saidel-Keesing, so you're definitely find bits and pieces that “bleads to this editions” (Like that Forbes Guthrie's expression – “as an author on the first edition his involvement naturally bleeds through to this edition”.)
It's possible to view the full intro of the book (PDF) through this link. There are Kindle and Paperback editions available of VMware vSphere Design – 2nd Edition.
The second edition of the book was written to include all the changes and enhancements that has been made in vSphere 5.1 and there is quite a lot of those. The book has 528 pages.
Scott Lowe:
In addition to a new cover design (nice, huh?), this new version of the book has a new interior as well! The book has been thoroughly updated to include design topics and considerations for vSphere 4, vSphere 5, and vSphere 5.1.
Forbes Gutrhie:
While I appreciate many of the fundamental principles remains, we poured over every section to ensure that it reflected the vSphere 5.x toolset. For example, chapter 2 in the first edition was based on the design choice of ESX or ESXi as the hypervisor. For this edition I largely re-wrote the chapter. It now dives under the covers of ESXi to explore how the image ticks, looks at how to deploy it across different environments, compares the design impacts of stateless versus installable ESXi, and how to configure and then manage the image
Kendrick Coleman:
Scott and Forbes were already hard at work with the 2nd Edition when they thought, maybe we should incorporate a chapter on vCloud Director design. I am thankful that these two reached out to me. I have never written anything that was ever published and it was a very humbling experience.
Jason Boche (as a technical editor):
As Technical Editor, I’m one of the few fortunate individuals who have already had the pleasure to have read the book. I can tell you that it is jam-packed with the deep technical detail, design perspective, and methodology you’d expect from these seasoned and well-respected industry experts.
The book can be ordered at Amazon.
You can find all my virtualization books in my Books page where I'm maintaining up-to-date collection.