As part of my VCDX preparation I’ve read lots of books, blogs and other documents to expand the knowledge and fill the gaps. That was partially one of the most valuable parts of the journey where I learned a lot. Without that I wouldn’t probably even read half of those great books.

I can’t say this is something that every candidate must read, but I decided to share this list as a VCDX BoM as I found it valuable for my VCDX-DCV prep.
At some point I used the list to define priorities and also track the timing but lost count at some point 🙂
The list presented here is in pretty much random order.

• IT Architect: Foundation In the Art of Infrastructure Design: A Practical Guide For IT Architects
• IT Architect: Designing Risk in IT Infrastructure
• IT Architect: The Journey
• IT Architect: Stories from the field vol.1
• VCDX Bootcamp by John Arrasjid, Ben Lin, Mostafa Khalil
• Storage Design and Implementation in vSphere 6: A Technology Deep Dive, 2nd edition
• VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit 3.1
• VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit 5.0
• Clustering Deep Dive
• vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive
• vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive
• Mastering VMware vSphere 6 by Nick Marshall
• Mastering VMware vSphere 6.5
• VMware vSphere Design 2nd edition by Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe
• Networking for VMware Administrators by Christopher Wahl, Steven Pantol
• Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments by Harley Stagner, Sean Crookston
• vSphere High Availability deep dive 6.0 by Duncan Epping
• VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide by Paul McSharry
• Site Realiability Engineering – O’Reilly
• Disaster Recovery planning – preparing for the unthinkable by Jon Willtiam Toigo
• Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy by Preston de Guise
• Designing a Storage Performance Platform by Frank Denneman, Todd Mace, Tom Queen
• Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware – Doing IT Rght by Michael Corey, Jeff Szastak, Michael Webster
• Mission critical applications on VMware PDFs – Oracle, SAP HANA, SQL, Exchange, etc.

I also attended tremendous amount of training, here are a few that I studied ebooks for quite extensively.

• vSphere Optimize & Scale 6.7 & 7.0
• vSphere Design Workshop 6.5 & 7.0
• Optimize and Scale 6.5
• SRM, Install Configure Manage 8.2
• NSX-T ICM 3.0

A few useful genereal links:

• https://thesaffageek.co.uk/2017/08/21/vcdx-design-scenario-tips/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_availability
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
• http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/definition/service-level-agreement
• http://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/Free-service-level-agreement-template-for-disaster-recovery-programs
• https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/service-level-objectives.html
• https://uptimeinstitute.com/tier-certification/design

And can’t forget about Rene’s spectacular list of resources:

• https://vcdx133.com/2015/01/27/vcdx-series/

If you have any other books that are worth to add to the list, please put them in comments!