Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - Short Review

When it comes to sysadmin buzzwords Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server ticks a lot of the boxes, which is a little misleading as half the book is about solid hardware level details that are actually rarely covered.

While this makes the first half more than a little dry it does introduce concepts that many of us take for granted, such as why DDR3 is faster than DDR2. The second half takes you through the Cisco UCS stack and where the benefits are. It’s a good starting point but I’d hoped for some more meat, maybe even a case-study or two. The book answered some of my questions but it’s not amazingly comprehensive so expect to do a lot more digging after you’ve finished reading it.

The book is self-published (Via Lulu) so it’s probably worth mentioning the quality - it’s the same as any other book I’ve bought recently. No better and no worse, which is actually pretty impressive.

6/10 - dry, fills a niche but covers a lot of general material not specific to UCS.