As most people in the VMware Virtualisation Community will know, we have been working on a new book entitled “VMware vSphere Performance”. The book was first announced in June 2011, and although being listed as available to pre-order on sites such as Amazon, the book is still yet to be published almost two years later.
Since the project began back in 2011, we have suffered several setbacks, with issues ranging form changes at the project management level, to issues with finding relevant performance related issues in order to produce content. I'm not going to go into much detail as to what exactly the issues were, however, since December 2011 the project has stalled and started up again on several occasions, and for the past year, there has been very little movement in terms of content being generated and therefore reviewed for the book. We have missed several targets in terms of publication dates. The book was originally planned to be released for VMware vSphere 5 and would cover VMware vSphere 4 and 5. We missed the publication for vSphere 5, and then vSphere 5.1 at which point Sybex (an imprint of Wiley) decided to push the publication date back even further and wait for the next release of VMware vSphere, whenever that may be, which would make sense, as at the time the shelf life of a book that is focused on vSphere 5 would not have been long enough to make it worth publishing.
Ever since the publication date got pushed back again, there have been even less interaction between the authors and the editorial teams, and I must admit that there were times that I had though that the book was dead. However, yesterday, the 24th of January, after a conversation with our technical editor, I decided to get in touch with all the authors, and the acquisition editor at Sybex, in order to determine the current state of the project. I have now received responses from most of the parties involved and to make a long story short, this is what is now going to happen.
We are yet to work out the finer details, but as of today, myself and co-author Jonathan Fitch will be taking control of the project in a much more involved way. Previously we were simply writing and submitting content and the rewriting the same content after editorial reviews. We are yet to determine who the “lead” author will be, but together we will review what has been done and what still needs doing, and together we will drive this thing forward. There is now a lot of work to be done, but we will be pushing hard for the next three to four months.
I would like to thank everyone who's been waiting for the book to hit the stands for their patience. I would also like to thank co-author Jonathan for his good work on the book thus far as well as technical editor Matt Liebowitz for his patience, understanding and words of encouragement.