Preface

VMware is the industry leader in datacenter virtualization. Its vSphere 5.x suite of products provides a robust and resilient platform for virtualizing server and application workloads. The features available in vSphere 5.x simplify the management of resources, increase the availability of applications, and guarantee the performance of workloads deployed in the virtualized datacenter.

This book provides recipes for creating a virtual datacenter design using the features of vSphere 5.x by guiding you through the process of identifying the design factors and applying them to the logical and physical design process.

The book provides steps that walk you through the design process from beginning to end, right from the discovery process to creating the conceptual design; calculating the resource requirements of the logical storage, compute, and network design; mapping the logical requirements to a physical design; and finally creating the design documentation.

The recipes in the book provide guidance for making design decisions to ensure the successful creation, and ultimately the successful implementation of a VMware vSphere 5.x virtual datacenter design.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Virtual Datacenter, provides an introduction to the benefits of the virtual datacenter, the VMware vSphere products, and basic virtualization concepts. The chapter identifies the differences between a datacenter administrator and a datacenter architect. An overview of the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacenter Design (VCAP-DCD) certification is also covered.

Chapter 2, The Discovery Process, explains how to identify stakeholders, conduct stakeholder interviews, and perform technical assessments to discover the business and technical goals of a virtualization project. The chapter covers how to use tools, the VMware Capacity planner and Windows Performance Monitor, to collect resource information during the discovery process.

Chapter 3, The Design Factors, explains how to identify and document design requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks. The chapter details how to use these design factors to create the conceptual design.

Chapter 4, The vSphere Management Design, describes the vCenter Server components and their dependencies. Recipes are included for determining the vCenter Server deployment option and Windows Server or virtual appliance, to determine the type of database to use based on the deployment size.

Chapter 5, The vSphere Storage Design, covers the logical storage design. Recipes are included to calculate the storage capacity and performance requirements for the logical storage design. The chapter also covers the details to select the correct RAID level and storage connectivity to support a design.

Chapter 6, The vSphere Network Design, provides details on the logical network design. This chapter explains how to calculate bandwidth requirements to support a vSphere design. Details on selecting a virtual switch topology, designing for network availability, and the network requirements to support vMotion and IP-connected storage are also covered.

Chapter 7, The vSphere Compute Design, provides recipes for calculating the CPU and memory requirements to create the logical compute design. The chapter also covers cluster design considerations for High Availability (HA) and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

Chapter 8, The vSphere Physical Design, explains how to satisfy the design factors by mapping the logical management, storage, network, and compute designs to hardware, to create the physical vSphere design. The chapter also provides details on creating a custom installation, on ISO to install ESXi, and on the best practices for host BIOS configurations.

Chapter 9, The Virtual Machine Design, looks at the design of virtual machines and application workloads running in the virtual datacenter. Recipes are provided for right-sizing virtual machine resources, enabling the ability to add virtual machine resources, and creating virtual machine templates. The chapter details the use of affinity and anti-affinity rules to improve application efficiency and availability. Converting or migrating physical servers to virtual machines is also covered in this chapter.

Chapter 10, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, covers options for backup, recovery, and continued operations in the event of a system failure. The chapter covers how to create backups of vSphere configurations so they can be quickly restored. The protection of virtual machines using VMware products for backup and replication is also covered in this chapter.

Chapter 11, The Design Documentation, covers documenting a vSphere design. The documentation includes the architecture design document, the implementation plan, the installation guide, the validation and test plan, and operational procedures. This chapter also provides tips for presenting the design to stakeholders and using the design documentation to implement the design.

What you need for this book

The software requirements for this book are as follows:

• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.x

• VMware vSphere vCenter Server 5.x

• VMware PowerCLI 5.x

• VMware vCLI 5.x

Who this book is for

If you are an administrator or consultant interested in designing virtualized datacenter environments using VMware vSphere 5.x and the supporting components, this book is for you. The book will help both new and experienced architects deliver professional VMware vSphere virtual datacenter designs.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows:

A URL is set as follows:

http://www.vmware.com/

File extensions are set as follows:

.vmx

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

esxcli storage nmp satp set –default-psp=<psp policy to set> --satp=<SATP_name>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "A template of the Data Collector Set can be created to easily import the Data Collector Set on other servers/workstations".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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