The rules for the competition are straightforward.

How you can win:

To win your copy of this book, all you need to do is come up with a comment to this post highlighting the reason “why you would like to win this book”.

Please note: Only winners residing n the USA and Europe would get a chance to win print copies. Others would be provided with eBook copies.

Duration of the contest & selection of winners:

The contest is valid for 7 days, and is open to everyone. Winners will be selected on the basis of their comment posted.

On Monday December 10th 2012 09:00 CET the comments will be closed.

The winners of the ThinApp 4.7 Essentials book are NiTRo and Michael.
Congratulations !

And since this blog is about PowerShell, the winners were selected as follows:

$comments = "Ed Mason","Giuseppe","Stuart McHugh","Michael",
"Ricky Boone","Patrick","Kevin","Bruce","André Pett",
"SchulieBug","Alex G","Fabian Garcia","ELISABETH Jean Didier",
"Dennis George","NiTRo","Firoze Bhorat","Sean Massey"

$comments | Get-Random -Count 2

Thanks to all participants.

About a week later you should see it appearing in a store near you ;-).

We set up a dedicated website  at https://powerclibook.com.

For now that site is read-only, but we will open up the forum soon, so you will be able to leave comments and ask questions concerning the book.

Small hint, on that site you will also find a number of links to pre-order the book!

At about the same time Alan got the once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist.

Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free! Alan has been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and traveling all over the globe. The little time he was at home, went of course in the first place to his loved ones.

As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed misserably.
So we decided to get some extra help for the book in order to keep our deadline.

And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:

Glenn Sizemore	Jonathan Medd	Arnim van Lieshout
Winner of the Scripting Games 2010 vExpert	PowerShell MVP	vExpert

In other words, the book will now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !

Can’t wait to read it

Some of you might be interested to know, Alan and Luc are writing a PowerCLI book.

We don’t have many more details at the moment but wanted to let you know, as we are both very excited (and nervous by the amount of work) about this project.

As you know we both live and breathe PowerCLI. And we want to share our knowledge to help others achieve the level of PowerCLI automation we both know is possible.

One thing you can expect from this book is a practical approach with examples galore. We aim to cover most of the common configuration/troubleshooting and reporting areas with easy to understand examples and explanations.
To answer some of your questions:

Q: What’s the title ?
A: Well, in the end we went for “VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration”

Q: Why ?
A: We’re both crazy enough to think we can do this.

Q: When ?
A: Our publisher, Sybex, targets 2011 Q1

Q: What ?
A: Expect a practical, down-to-earth approach. We’re going to show you how you can manage all aspects of your vSphere environment with PowerCLI.

Q: Who are these guys ?
A: Alan, who recently joined EMC’s vSpecialist army, is well-know from his Virtu-Al blog, his UK VMUG appearences, as a co-host of the Get-Scripting podcasts and as the winner of the recent Script-O-Mania contest.
Luc, aka LucD, is known from the PowerCLI Community, his LucD notes blog, his Dutch VMUG and VMworld appearances and as the winner of the first PowerCLI Scripting contest.

Q: Where do these guys live ?
A: Alan, contrary to some rumours, is an English guy and lives in Wiltshire, UK.
Luc lives in Belgium and works in the Netherlands. The best of both worlds

The intention of the authors (Thomas, Duncan, Dave, Stuart, Alan and Bernie) was to produce a 150-page booklet containing the answers to all the practical questions you might have when you are setting up or managing a vSPhere environment. The result became a nearly 250-page booklet crammed with advice, processes, procedures and best practices. And to top it all off they included a lot of PowerCLI scripts.

The vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide should be published shortly (matter of weeks, a good source tells me). Watch the blogs of some of the authors for updates !

• Thomas Bryant III
• Stu Radnidge
• Dave Mishchenko
• Alan Renouf
• Duncan Epping

For the story behind the book and more details have a look at John Troyer‘s VMworld webcast with Thomas Bryant.