Book Review: VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

If you are actively managing VMware environments with workloads that have high performance needs (such as all of the virtualized SQL Servers that we work on), this new book called VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive, written by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort, is a must read book! Designed for VMware-oriented system architects, this book walks the reader through each layer of host resource allocation and management in a way that no other book has ever accomplished.

This book redefined the phrase “deep dive”, and I’m taking a lot of notes for future authoring and presentations. The depth of content is unparalleled in tech authoring.

Topic sections such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking, the four main areas of resource management on any virtualization host, are presented. Anyone can talk about these settings in general, but the advanced VCDX-level topics are covered in incredible depth. We work with a lot of advanced virtualized SQL Server VMs, and significant discussions from this book for performance tuning these SQL Servers include:

• Advanced vNUMA balancing and optimization
• CPU core counts versus clock speed
• vNUMA memory speeds and non-local memory access
• Clearing up misconceptions about vSphere Balanced Power Management
• Queues and resource allocations

Go get this book – NOW! It’s a must read, and read it twice. No, three times. Then give the book to colleagues who can benefit. I’ve got two copies on my desk right now, and know who these will be sent to after I’m done re-reading them!