If reading online PDFs isn't your thing, or you prefer to print up a few copies as handouts at ...say
VMworld, we are happy to provide a print on demand service that will allow you to print and ship copies directly to you. There is a 3 week lead time for this option, so please plan accordingly. We do not make ANY royalties on this sample chapter (that is wrong in too many ways) and the price reflects the actual printing costs. We know, it isn't cheap to print 110 pages!
As always we want to thank everyone for their ongoing support while we wrap up the final pieces of the book. With luck, we should be seeing pre-order information popping up on Amazon in the near future.
We have finally gotten to a point where we are extremely close to having all first draft writing of the new VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide completed. We are anticipating that this will be completed and off to editors (our own editors this time) towards the end of the first week of July.
One of the largest delays we had with the previous book was that as amazing as Brian Madden is, he is quite busy. For that reason we will be using our own editors and attempting to do page layout on our own to try to get the book available by VMworld in San Francisco.
Another challenge that really disturbs us is how long it takes for distribution to reach overseas resellers. I believe it took a full 2-3 months longer for Amazon.co.uk to ship than it did its US counterpart. For that reason we are kicking around ideas on secure online distribution or print on demand services that are quickly available. This should buy us the necessary amount of time to put the book through the official distribution channels and get out to retail locations.
Since everyone is probably wondering "What the hell?" we figured we would be nice to you and not even keep it a secret that you can expect not one, not two, but THREE sample chapters freely available for download within the next 2-3 weeks. We have these off to the grammatical editors now, and after a quick blow through by our technical guys, we will pretty them up and make them available right here.
As always, we do apologize for the massive delays in the book. VMware was nice enough to change quite a few things between versions of ESX. We have always stated that we absolutely want the best available book, not the first one rushed out the door. It's coming down to the wire, but we may actually still have both. You truly have to judge the usefulness of any information that comes out either before or shortly after the release of a major component of your infrastructure such as VI3. We don't feel that anyone can truly know the best practices as we define them for at least 12 months of actual use (and that includes VMware themselves).
Keep your eyes posted on this site. As soon as we finally get the book listed on Amazon (boy we learned a lesson about selling it too early last time) we will provide a link so you can buy it from our site and maximize the amount of money we can make on this thing. Expect quite a bit of activity over the next few weeks. For now, feel free to download an electronic copy of our original VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide through the link on the right side of the page.
Also, don't forget to check out our YouTube video that was taken by Richard Garthsagen in Nice, France with Alessandro Perilli, Mike Laverick, and myself (Scott Herold).
Sincerely,
Scott Herold, Ron Oglesby, and Mike Laverick