Great reference for developers and admins alike
While this book is not full of product information for administrators, it serves the purpose that it was intended for...showing you how to programmatically automate ESX and VirtualCenter tasks.
The book limits the use of shell scripts and command-line tools, opting more for object-oriented programming languages. A thorough walk-through of code for both ESX 2.5.x/VC 1.x as well as ESX 3.x/VC 2.x is included in the book, with samples in VB, C#, Perl, and Java. I particularly liked the explanation of the SDK web service architecture and the idiosyncrasies of consuming the web service with typical SOAP clients.
If you're thinking about creating custom software to interact with VMware products or you simply want to write custom scripts to ease administration, this is a great reference book for you!
was the time to short?
like nearly every VMware administrator or consultant I couldn't wait for the release of this book. After a delay to the first announcement of about 7 months I hoped to get a book including all news about VI3 too.
But the whole book seems to be a patchwork, mixing ESX2/VC1 and VI3 mostly without a comment at what version the reader is. It's quite obvious that some of authors have written their chapters at ESX 2 times without updating to ESX 3 like chapter 7 (backup).
Some of the chapters are really useless like the first kickstart chapter, which doesn't contain any news beside the manual, even rather the screenshots are from an old beta version I think and it's not mentioned that you must change a xml file to make the kickstart generator available.
Not one new esxcfg- commands of ESX3 is even mentioned!!! You are searching without success for the backup scripts like vcbmounter.
Most scripting example or tips can be found for several month or even years (like APC Powerchute installation) within the VMware forum.
Many people begin to use python or java for scripting VI3 - yes, you don't even find the letter j in the index!
The only fact I'm giving two stars instead of one are the scripting chapters for VB .net and the downloadable scripts from the syngress website if you own that book.
(2 reviews)
