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VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design  Cookbook
VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design  Cookbook

VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook: Over 75 practical recipes to confidently design an efficient virtual datacenter with VMware vSphere 6.x , Second Edition

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Profile Icon kim bottu Profile Icon Hersey Cartwright
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.2 (10 Ratings)
Paperback Jun 2016 324 pages 2nd Edition
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Profile Icon kim bottu Profile Icon Hersey Cartwright
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.2 (10 Ratings)
Paperback Jun 2016 324 pages 2nd Edition
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VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook

Chapter 2. The Discovery Process

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Identifying the design factors
  • Identifying stakeholders
  • Conducting stakeholder interviews
  • VMware Capacity Planner
  • Using Windows Performance Monitor
  • Conducting a VMware Optimization Assessment
  • 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:

Introduction

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.

You need the following requirements to identify the design factors:

  • Functional and non-functional 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...

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 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

Chief executive officer

Chief financial officer

Chief technology officer

  • 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...

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…

Here are some 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...

VMware Capacity Planner

VMware's Capacity Planner is an inventory and planning tool available to VMware partner organizations. It 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...

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:
    How to do it…
  2. Once the Data Collector Set application has been created, add new Data Collector to the Data Collector Set, as shown in the following screenshot:
    How to do it…
  3. Name new Data Collector and select the Performance counter data collector radio button, as shown in the following screenshot:
    How to do it…
  4. 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...

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.

You need the following requirements to identify the design factors:

  • Functional and non-functional 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...

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Key benefits

  • Get the first book on the market that helps you design a virtualized data center with VMware vSphere 6
  • Achieve enhanced compute, storage, network, and management capabilities for your virtual data center
  • Exciting and practical recipes help you to design a virtual data easily by leveraging the features of VMware vSphere 6

Description

VMware is the industry leader in data center virtualization. The vSphere 6.x suite of products provides a robust and resilient platform to virtualize server and application workloads. With the release of 6.x a whole range of new features has come along such as ESXi Security enhancements, fault tolerance, high availability enhancements, and virtual volumes, thus simplifying the secure management of resources, the availability of applications, and performance enhancements of workloads deployed in the virtualized datacenter. This book provides recipes to create a virtual datacenter design using the features of vSphere 6.x by guiding you through the process of identifying the design factors and applying them to the logical and physical design process. You’ll follow 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; security design; and finally creating the design documentation. The recipes in this book provide guidance on making design decisions to ensure the successful creation, and ultimately the successful implementation, of a VMware vSphere 6.x virtual data center design.

Who is this book for?

If you are an administrator or consultant interested in designing virtualized datacenter environments using VMware vSphere 6.x or previous versions of vSphere and the supporting components, this book is for you. It will help both new and experienced architects deliver professional VMware vSphere virtual datacenter designs.

What you will learn

  • Identify key factors related to a vSphere design and apply them to every step of the design process
  • Mitigate security risks and meet compliance requirements in a vSphere design.
  • Create a vSphere conceptual design by identifying technical and business requirements
  • Determine the type of database to use based on the deployment size.
  • 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
  • Leverage the latest vSphere 6.x features to ensure manageability, performance, availability, and security in a virtual datacenter design

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 28, 2016
Length: 324 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785283468
Vendor :
VMware
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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 28, 2016
Length: 324 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785283468
Vendor :
VMware
Tools :

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Table of Contents

13 Chapters
1. The Virtual Datacenter Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. The Discovery Process Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. The Design Factors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. vSphere Management Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. vSphere Storage Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. vSphere Network Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. vSphere Compute Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. vSphere Physical Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Virtual Machine Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. vSphere Security Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Design Documentation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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dcdcdc Dec 20, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Quality material as usual from Hersey. I find it very valuable to have the newer version (in addition to the 5.x) for my needs.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Kim Bottu Aug 12, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Whether you are a seasoned architect who still is getting familiar with vSphere 6 or a hands-on engineer who likes to get a firmer grip on design and architecture using vSphere 6, Hersey’s updated datacenter cookbook just might be just the book you need.This book graciously keeps a good balance between datacenter design principles, best practices and howto’s. In this book Hersey takes you by the hand and guides you through the steps needed to create a virtual datacenter design using vSphere 6.Besides the necessary theoretical explanations Hersey offers his readers 75 recipes which they can use to help with the creation or optimization of a virtual datacenter design: What are the prerequisites you need for a design? Who do you have to talk to? What are goals, requirements, risks and assumptions? How do you create a conceptual, logical and physical design? How do you need to calculate how many CPU, RAM or storage you need? What are the new features in vSphere 6 which might be important to my design? What basic design documentation do you need to create and how do you create it?Across both versions of Hersey’s book the design principles have remained the same but there is no denying that vSphere 6 has a lot of differences which set it apart from vSphere 5.x. As such Hersey’s design recipes which have been modified to reflect a vSphere 6 virtual datacenter design where needed, should be a welcome read for everyone. The structure of the book:This book contains one chapter more than its predecessor and caps now at 12 chapters. It goes without saying that datacenter security is becoming more and more important and as such security has been assigned its own chapter. Personally I think this is a very welcome addition.Here are some of the highlights for me:I really have tried to find my personal highlights in this book but the thing is, in a design all of items touched in the chapters of this book are equally important. To single out some chapters as I have done in some other reviews would not only do dishonor to this book but also to the design and architecture principles themselves.So let me tell you why I think this book is great:– A lot of aspiring architects have a tendency to look at architecture from a technical perspective first but a change in architecture should be driven by a business need. Hersey addresses this really well in the discovery process in chapter 2. In short: A discovery process is a mix of finding out what the business needs and discovering the design factors based on requirements, constraints, assumptions and risks.– This book reads like someone is giving you an excellent classroom experience using only a book as a medium. Just like its predecessor, the second edition of Hersey’s book “VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook” has a very good and clear structure. Each chapter builds upon the previous chapters, and where needed examples are given.– To me and many of my friends, acquaintances and peers who have joined me on the road to VCAP5-DCD, Hersey’s previous book was a must read while preparing for exam-day. We had a good reason to read the “VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook”: It explained in an easy to understand fashion many of the topics required to know to pass the VCAP5-DCD exam and the exercises in the book were easy to follow and understand as well. Personally I would advice anyone to add this book to the collection of books to read prior to taking the VCAP6-DCV Design exam.Why this book stands out from the crowd:As an instructor with the VMware IT Academy program at the Tidewater Community College Hersey Cartwright knows how important a good course structure is and how critical that structure is to make sure the message will come over loud and clear. This book is a very good example of good structure. The theory, the design principles and best practices in this book are explained in such a fashion that they are easy to follow.If you are new to design and architecture, finding the right literature to get started might be daunting. Basic principles about good design and architecture should be easily understandable for people new to these topics. Hersey’s book is a real success in this.
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Arnab Jun 14, 2017
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Excellent Book.
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Rajeev Feb 26, 2019
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Best book for vmware
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Daniel P Jun 06, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Hersey does an incredible job of laying out everything you need to understand from assessing, designing, validating, and implementing a VMware vSphere architecture. While this does cover vSphere 6.0, these topics are still very applicable and cover much of the design methodology found in VMware Education courses.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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