The design, architectures, and protocols used in modern data centers are the core topics of this book. Published by Cisco Press, it illustrates many examples with Cisco-specific hardware and configuration settings; from a content point of view, the material stays mostly vendor neutral and generic.

The book is structured in five logical parts. Each part relates to a specific application domain of virtualization. A short introduction to virtualization is given in the first chapter, followed by seven individual chapters (chapters 2 through 8) on specific network technologies that are virtualized in current data centers. These chapters make up the second part in the book and span a broad scope of technologies that range from virtual device contexts up to a complete virtualized chassis. The book provides an overwhelming amount of information on layer 2 technologies, network design, and switching. The third part (chapters 9 through 12) of the book is about storage technologies and their virtualization. Here, the author starts with a historical overview of the different storage media and moves on to advanced storage virtualization using virtual storage area networks (VSANs) and their consolidation.

Server virtualization is considered in Part 4 (chapters 13 through 16), where my favorite chapter (chapter 16) details how security policies and service orchestration can be enabled over multiple security appliances and traffic optimization can be performed using the location/ID separation protocol. The fifth part (chapter 17) bridges the link between cloud computing and virtual data centers. This chapter is highly relevant to readers interested in software-defined networking (SDN) and its potential in a data center. Finally, the two appendices show the extent to which the large family of Cisco products can be used for this purpose.

The book is excellent reading for those interested in how virtualization is supporting modern data centers. Almost all of the concepts are illustrated with concrete configuration settings. More experienced readers will use this as a timely reference and practical handbook. I can hardly imagine a virtualization-related topic that is not covered in this book. For all these reasons, I strongly recommend it.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads