Book Review: Interconnecting Datacenters Using VPLS

Amazon just published my 4 star review of “Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS (Ensure Business Continuance on Virtualized Networks by Implementing Layer 2 Connectivity Across Layer 3) ”

Before we get too deep into it, I need to be up front that while I LOVE Virtualization, I still flirt a bit with networking and the like. That is what lead me to this book. Where I feel it fits into the virtualization world, is that for those of us who were the “Jack of all trades” hat, you need to know networking almost as well as you do virtualization. For those of us who deal strictly in all things virtual, it is beyond helpful for us to be aware of what is going on elsewhere in the design so that we can be better at troubleshooting and designing our solutions.

With that out of the way… into the review:

I agree with the prior fellow’s comments:

"The book’s goal is to provide architectural design and configuration guide on Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) based solution that use high speed and low latency network as well as Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) isolation to connect multiple data centers.

The book starts with chapters explaining the high availability clusters concept, introduction to VPLS, and implementation of traffic engineering using MPLS. If you are familiar with MPLS, these chapters are easily readable."

It delivers on these fairly well. I am first and foremost a Virtualization engineer, but found the insight that the book provides in the area of delivering highly available network architectures to be value in the extreme. Beyond the introduction chapters, the book provides reference designs & sample configurations that provide further practical guidance.

The knowledge in this book is densely packed and suffers a bit in readability because of it. Due to that, I rate this book 4/5 stars, but would recommend it to anyone responsible for network architecture & design.