Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the works from Mike Laverick from RTFM Education fame.  He has written quite a few freely distributed guides over the years... helping countless number of people with their VMware environments. 

Now, Mike is finishing up his latest book, one that covers VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).  If you aren't familiar with SRM, VMware describes it like so:

Accelerate recovery and ensure successful recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans.  VMware Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery rapid, reliable and manageable so that you can meet recovery objectives. By eliminating complex manual recovery steps and enabling non-disruptive testing of recovery plans, Site Recovery Manager removes the risk and worry from disaster recovery, helping you protect all of your important systems and applications.

And Mike Laverick will tell you how to install and configure it, as well as how to use it in non-marketing speak.  Following the path of his other helpful guides, we can expect that this book will be helping to explain away the complications of a technology.

The book is currently being reviewed by various folks in the industry, and it's close to completion.  After that, it will head to LULU.com for publication.  A price tag hasn't been set for the book yet, though I'm sure it won't break the bank. 

When I asked Mike to tell me who the book was being written for, he had this to say: 

"Who is written for? Well, not for newbies to Vi3. You will have to know your ESX/VC pretty good –I’m NOT revising all the content from the vi3book.com as that would over bloat it. There are certain advanced concepts such as VMFS resignaturing which I will explain again – and I will be taking people thru a Software iSCSI setup on ESX (as most of these free SAN virtual appliance use it, and NAS is not currently supported) to get people out of the starting blocks if they are using the Left Hand Networks VSA..."

Mike said it would be a step-by-step guide to SRM, much in the same format as the popular RTFM guides.  He also said the book isn’t a DR book, it’s an SRM book.  So his target reader is a tech guy, who's boss comes along and says, “what’s all this SRM about – do we need it – management say they want it – here’s two weeks out of the schedule – off you go."

You can find the 1st draft of his last chapter in a PDF format where he says the MOST interesting parts are the PowerShell pieces that allow you to do bulk administration tasks - necessary in handling many virtual machines and ESX hosts it includes:

* Getting up and Started with Microsoft Community Technical Preview of PowerShell 2.0 with the VMware Community Extensions
* Rescan all the HBA on every ESX hosts in VirtualCenter
* Renaming VMFS volumes
* Creating a internal vSwitch on all ESX hosts with .PS1 file - prior to a test failover
* Searching a VMFS volume, and registering VMs to the right folder & resource pool
* Fixing the Networking of many VMs so that the point to the right port-group

And he is also sharing Chapter 2: Installing and Configuring Left Hand Networks VSA.

If you haven't already, check out Mike Laverick's Web site and his current set of helpful guides.  Stay tuned for more information about his book as the time draws closer to print.