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VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook
VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook

VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook: This recipe-driven tutorial is the easy way to master VMware vSphere to design a virtual datacenter. You'll learn in simple steps that cover everything from initial groundwork to creating professional design documentation.

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VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook

Chapter 2. The Discovery Process

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Identifying the design factors

  • Identifying stakeholders

  • Conducting stakeholder interviews

  • VMware Capacity Planner

  • Using Windows Performance Monitor

  • Identifying dependencies

Introduction


This chapter will introduce you to the design factors and focus on the discovery phase of the design process.

The following image displays the phases of the design process:

Discovery is the most important phase of the design process. It is also the most time-consuming. The discovery process includes a meeting with the stakeholders to determine business requirements that the design must meet. It also includes current state assessments to determine the technical requirements that the design must satisfy in order to meet the customer requirements, which in turn become the design requirements.

During the discovery process, an architect must interact with many different individuals in an organization to collect the necessary information that is needed to begin creating the conceptual design. Decision makers, strategic planners, facilities and maintenance providers, network administrators, storage administrators, application administrators, and application end users can, in some way...

Identifying the design factors


The design factors are the primary considerations that influence the design. These factors define the function that the design must accomplish, how it should accomplish it, and what may prevent the design from accomplishing it.

How to do it…

The design factors encompass much more than just the physical resources, such as the CPU, memory, and storage, necessary to run workloads in a virtual environment.

Identifying the design factors needs the following requirements:

  • Functional and nonfunctional requirements

  • Constraints

  • Assumptions

  • Risks

How it works…

Requirements define what a design must do and how it should do it. Requirements can be business or technical. There are two types of requirements: functional and nonfunctional. The requirements should be clearly defined. A good design requirement is verifiable, traceable, feasible, and specific.

Functional requirements specify a specific function of the design or simply what a design must do. Functional requirements can...

Identifying stakeholders


A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in or benefits from the design. A virtual datacenter design will have at least some impact on many, if not all, areas of an organization and not just those associated with technology.

How to do it…

Identify the key stakeholders, including the following:

  • Project sponsors

  • Application owners and providers

  • System, network, and storage administrators

  • Application users

How it works…

Understanding the role of the stakeholders helps an architect to identify who can provide the information necessary to design a successful virtual datacenter solution. The details of the stakeholders and their roles are specified in the following table:

Stakeholders

Roles

C-level executives

  • Strategic planning for the organization

  • Setting up business policies and goals

  • Budget approval

  • Project sponsorship

Business unit managers or directors

  • Strategic planning for the business unit

  • Managing day-to-day operations

  • Influencing business policies and goals

  • Make and...

Conducting stakeholder interviews


During the discovery process, the primary source of information will be the stakeholder interviews. These interviews can be face-to-face meetings or can be done over the phone (or the Web). Interviews are not only helpful in collecting information about the business needs and technical requirements, but also keep the stakeholders engaged in the project.

How to do it…

Following are examples of the questions that should be asked in order to determine the business requirements that will influence the design:

  • What are the business initiatives, challenges, and goals?

  • Are there Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in place? What are they?

  • What are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements?

  • Are there any compliance requirements?

  • Who are the SMEs associated with the project?

  • Who are the stakeholders?

  • Who are the decision makers?

  • Are there deadlines that the project must meet?

  • Is there a budget for the project? What is the budget for the project...

VMware Capacity Planner


VMware's Capacity Planner is an inventory and planning tool available to VMware partner organizations, which collects resource utilization information from systems, analyzes the data against industry-standard reference data, and provides the information needed to successfully consolidate the servers into a virtualized environment.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to complete a Capacity Planner engagement:

  1. Determine the amount of time for which the Capacity Planner engagement should run based on the business cycle.

  2. Choose the type of Capacity Planner assessment to be run: a Consolidation Estimate (CE) or a Capacity Assessment (CA).

  3. Deploy the Capacity Planner collector in the environment to be assessed.

  4. Verify whether the collector is collecting performance metrics for the systems to be analyzed.

  5. Collect metrics for the duration of the business cycle.

  6. Generate Capacity Planner reports.

How it works…

A Capacity Planner engagement should typically run for at least 30 days to ensure...

Using Windows Performance Monitor


The Microsoft Windows PerfMon can be used to collect performance information, such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk I/O utilization of the Windows servers.

How to do it…

In this example, Microsoft Windows PerfMon is used to collect disk I/O metrics using the following steps:

  1. Open Performance Monitor and use the Data Collector Set wizard to create a user-defined data collector as displayed in the following screenshot:

  2. Once the Data Collector Set application has been created, add a new Data Collector to the Data Collector Set as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. Name the new Data Collector and select the Performance counter data collector radio button as shown in the following screenshot:

    Add the following counters for the object _Total instance to the data collector:

    • \LogicalDisk\Avg. Disk Sec/Read

    • \LogicalDisk\Avg. Disk Sec/Write

    • \LogicalDisk\Disk Bytes/Sec

    • \LogicalDisk\Disk Reads/Sec

    • \LogicalDisk\Disk Writes/Sec

    • \LogicalDisk\Split IO/sec

    • \LogicalDisk...

Identifying dependencies


A dependency is a relationship among systems or services. During the discovery process, dependencies should be identified and documented. In Chapter 1, The Virtual Datacenter, we discussed the importance of taking a holistic view when designing a virtualized environment. Identifying dependencies is the key to the holistic approach of designing.

How to do it…

An architect must identify dependencies in order to understand what effect a design decision or change may have on other services. The architect should identify the following dependencies:

  • Identify physical infrastructure dependencies

  • Identify application and service dependencies

How it works…

Dependencies can be service-to-service; for example, a web application depends on a frontend web server and a backend database. Dependencies can be service-to-infrastructure; for example, the web application requires a static IP address and a minimum of 10 MB of network bandwidth.

Physical and infrastructure dependencies are generally...

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What you will learn

  • Identify key factors related to a vSphere design and apply them to every step of the design process
  • Create a vSphere conceptual design by identifying technical and business requirements
  • Design for performance, availability, recoverability, manageability, and security
  • Map the logical resource design into the physical vSphere design
  • Create professional vSphere design documentation to ensure a successful implementation of the vSphere design

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jan 24, 2014
Length: 260 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782177012
Vendor :
VMware
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Jan 24, 2014
Length: 260 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782177012
Vendor :
VMware
Tools :

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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
The Virtual Datacenter Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Discovery Process Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Design Factors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The vSphere Management Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The vSphere Storage Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The vSphere Network Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The vSphere Compute Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The vSphere Physical Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Virtual Machine Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Design Documentation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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L R E Sep 03, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book takes a logical approach and really seems to explain things from an architectural standpoint. This resource helps the reader to understand some concepts and gives further insight on how things work in a production environment and design aspects that should be taken into consideration. I particularly like the author's section on virtual networking and vMotion, it really just put a lot of separate concepts together. Overall an excellent resource for those of us who are working to gain a better understanding of VMware design aspects.
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Zoran Dec 27, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
A great book on vSphere infrastructure design - focused, clear, concise and well structured. It's very useful for preparing DCD exam, but also for learning about IT infrastructure design in general.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Rob Cox Feb 15, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Great content and easy to follow recipes / calculations to ensure your VMware vSphere design works as required. Simple and effective while still giving the technical depth needed to handle just about any deployment. If you are looking to design and deploy a vSphere environment or looking to improve on an existing deployment, this book is an absolute must!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Javier Apr 14, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I really like this book because it is lean, it will provide the information you need to be able to design a functioning system with no details left in the dark. Go ahead, purchase it, and be confident that Hersey will guide you through your design process with ease, and be confident that you will have a reliable system as the output of this process.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Carli Cheatham Apr 08, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This very easy to understand text has great graphics that make managing a VM data center easy...just like it says - a cookbook of ideas!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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