Customer Reviews

The VMWare Workstation 5 Handbook (Charles River Media Networking/Security)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

80% of the book seems to be almost quoted from the VMWare documentation. After a brief intro chapter, it spends another chapter on installation, followed by a walkthrough of the VM UI that, in similar fashion to most of the book, goes about as deep as you would get by taking your mouse and clicking through the menus and looking at their item descriptions.

Very little takes any more depth than what comes with VMWare in the first place. For example, chapter 13 deals with "Performance tuning abd optimization". It spends a paragraph telling you that clicking the debug checkbox turns debug logging on (which the help file tells you too) but doesn't tell you any details about it or when you might want to use it. The "log...progress periodically" option on that dialog is never even mentioned.

The last two chapters on VMWare Workstation have a little more information out of them, though again, most of the "Tricks and Tips" are things that anyone can know from reading the documentation or playing with the UI for a bit.

If your time is precious, you learn well by reading, and you've never used VMWare before, I would recommend this book. If you've used VMWare for a while, you probably already know almost everything in the book.

Steven S. Warren's VMware Workstation 5 Handbook (VW5H) is a great book for beginning and intermediate VMware Workstation (WS) users. It is well-written, thorough, and informative. Those who are trying to deploy WS for average home, research, or corporate purposes will find their needs met. Those looking for in-depth coverage exceeding VMware's online documentation will be disappointed. Still, I've been using VMware for almost 4 years, and I learned a few new tricks.

VMware's online documentation is excellent. Those seeking to install and operate WS will find most of their needs met reading VMware's free guides. VW5H provides context and problem-solving techniques that one may not acquire from VMware's documentation. For example, a new user may be unaware of the purpose of a product like VMware P2V Assistant. By reading Ch 15 of VW5H, the user will learn how P2V can create virtual machines out of physical systems.

VW5H offered several tips that I found helpful. I had never heard of Vnetsniffer, although the tool dates to at least 2001. I was unaware of the performance counters described in Ch 13. I thought the procedure for turning VMs into Windows services in Ch 16 was also innovative. I liked the Windows command line coverage in Ch 16 and elsewhere.

I would have liked more information on alternatives to WS, to help guide deployment decisions. I concur with an earlier review that uses debugging as an example of a lost opportunity. One can read the VMware documentation to learn about enabling WS debugging. Interpreting sample output would have been helpful in VW5H. Some sort of performance comparison between using VM disks allocated all up front, or those that grow incrementally, would have been appreciated. Ch 12 should have featured a figure to explain the sample network explained at the end of the chapter.

I have not read Rob's Guide To Using VMware by Rob Bastiaansen, but the table of contents for that book seems to satisfy more of my requirements for a book on VMware. If you focus is solely WS and you are a beginner or intermediate user, VW5H is for you.

The VMWare Workstation 5 Handbook (Networking & Security) (Paperback) by Steven S. Warren
ISBN: 1584503939
For someone who does not like to go through a lot of options and help pages to find the answer this book is a real time saver. Most users will find that this book covers all their queries and then some. The author strikes a right balance in satisfying both the dorks and the nerds amongst us with the depth and breath of the topics covered.
VMWare provides excellent online documentation but then why would one buy this book and why is this book so popular? The main reason is that the author has realised that people using VMWare have a very real need to learn to do things fast and be done with the installation and configuration and get on with testing their software in a distributed enviornment.
Steven S. Warren is a Senior Technical Consultant for The Ultimate Software Group and was named a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
I give this book 5 stars on a scale of 5, 5 being the highest. I strongly recommend this book.
Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP

When it comes to virtual computers installed on one physical computer nobody does it quite as well as VMWare. Version 5 of their workstation product is a significant improvement over earlier versions with easier installation, better discovery of available hardware, and many other features. While it is easy enough to install a basic system and the software pretty much installs itself the documentation of VMWare has always been lacking. This book fills that void by supplying a superb manual to match the superb software product. The author takes a kind of quick start approach as he goes through installation and upgrading, and then moves straight to creating a virtual machine so you can get working with it right away. From there he moves to some of the more advanced features such as working with snapshots, cloning a virtual machine, and working with teams. This is followed by a section on networking virtual machines, performance tuning, and optimization. He even includes an excellent section on tips and tricks. If you have the need for more than one operating system installed on your computer or just want to work with more than one then virtual machines is the easiest way to go about it. No rebooting and working in just one system at a time like a dual-boot configuration, you just run them both at once and switch back and forth as needed. And it will support more than just two virtual machines running at the same time. The VMWare Workstation 5 Handbook is highly recommended to anyone interested in the VMWare product.

We are using this as our textbook in the operating systems class I am currently taking although it's a user guide and not a textbook. VMWare is not that difficult and if you are computer literate, you won't need this. If you do want / need a VMWare reference, this is definitely the one to have.

1. It is just a manual, not a text book that you want to learn more.
2. I don't think we need to spend $28 to buy a manual. Too Much!!
3. Easy installation if you follow the instruction from the book.

It was good at the time, but now it is pretty dated, wouldn't recommend it for current VMware users. Unfortunate, because I don't think there's a comparable good VMware book out there now.

Finally - a product that allows for simultaneous booting of several operating systems.

I am absolutely very happy about this product. Not only does it allow me to do application software testing efficiently, but also allows me to practice for my Networking / MCP, MCSA certifications.

Now I won't have to build any more PCs - I can have a virtual laboratory using one PC.

In the past few years, the need and application of using a product such as VMWare has increased exponentially. Current hardware technology (such as processor speed, large memories and storage space) has allowed us to have a Virtual Machine that can host numerous types of Operating Systems and configurations. This means that one can have a single PC, but using VMWare, have multiple Operating Systems and configurations. Have you ever needed to write a program that works on Linux, various versions of Windows and Unix operating systems? Before VMWare, you would have had to have multiple boxes each with a different setup, but all you need now is a single box with VMWare - and host any Operating System and configuration that you like all in one box.

The power of VMWare is explained and demonstrated throughout the book - from basics all the way to topics such as Physical to Virtual conversation. P2V allows you to create a mirror image of any environment and use VMWare to host that environment thus allowing you to test before you go to production, for example: mirroring your production environment, testing, deploying and blowing away the test environment all in one day's work. Snapshots are great way to further expand the power of VMWare. You can test a configuration, take a snapshot, change the configuration and test again to see the difference. VMWare brings with itself an enormous flexibility for developers and engineers alike.

VMWare tools, a package that allows your virtual machine to have better mouse response, screen resolution and seamless desktop environment are covered in detail by the author. I have personally been using VMware for a number of months now, and VMWare 5.0 has been a life saver for me. I have a laptop and I wanted to separate out my personal stuff from work documents, etc. With VMWare, I can do just that. This book showed me other features that I never knew about such as backup, image transfer and snapshots. I found the chapter of performance tuning and optimization particularly useful, as many of you agree, Virtual Machines introduce an overhead that many of us worry about. I tend to lose sleep over my performance degradation, but I seem to have been wrong about how much overhead VMware actually introduces.

The author talks about memory and disk optimization that can dramatically increase performance. In all honestly, I don't even notice that I am running a VM anymore. I had to change my background to tell me I am on VM or not - because I was not able to tell them apart. Network optimization is also covered in detail. VMWare is capable of handling up to a 1Gbit network card and data transfer rate. Bridging technique is used to allow any of your VM's access the network. If you are a developer such as myself, it is very helpful and important for you to know that you can test a distributed application - simulate it as if it was running on multiple boxes, right on your laptop or desktop using VMware. That to me was priceless. I can go from one instance to the next and I can test, deploy and maintain my application right from my laptop. After I have done everything, I simply burn a CD and transfer the image to the server that I want to deploy my application on, and I am done.

This book is simply great! If you are a VMWare fan, then you must read this book as it tells you things about VMWare that makes you love it even more. If you have never used VMWare, then you can now with a demo copy of the product that is included on a CD at the end of the text and b

I had the need to configure a test cluster in VMware Workstation. This book dedicates an entire chapter to just that. After working through the chapter, I had a functional virtual cluster running on my laptop.

I found the Tips & Tricks section to be very interesting reading.