Preface

Welcome to vSphere High Performance Cookbook, Second Edition. The authors here are focused on providing a cookbook of resources and recipes, so you can go from understanding your environment to optimizing your infrastructure characteristics to achieve optimal performance. As you take in each chapter, they will provide you with independent insights into different aspects of design that can be treated independently, but when utilized together will make for a more performance-ready and optimized virtual infrastructure. Central to this book is the leveraging of the VMware vSphere suite.

VMware vSphere 6.5 is a sophisticated suite of software. Although it is straightforward to initially set up, the default options may not result in the best performance in your environment. This book focuses on tuning the parts of vSphere that can result in a better-performing environment. The recipes in this book walk through the major components of a VMware environment and highlight where potential performance issues are and how to address them. As vSphere has matured over the years, many third-party software companies have been created to complement vSphere. This book also has recipes dedicated to third-party software and their benefits, where appropriate.

The book has been written for VMware administrators running vSphere 6.5. Administrators running earlier versions of vSphere will find most of the ideas and suggestions relevant to their versions; however, the specific steps in the recipes will be different.