vSphere Compute Design

This chapter will cover logical compute design. Compute refers to the processor and memory resources required to support the virtual machines running in the vSphere environment. Calculating the required CPU and memory resources is an important part of the design process and ensures that the environment will be able to support the virtual machine workloads. Design decisions like scaling up, scaling out, and clustering hosts will be covered. The following diagram displays how the compute design is integrated into the design process:

Compute design in the vSphere design workflow

In a physical environment where a single operating system or a single application is installed on a dedicated physical hardware, compute utilization usually averages as 10-20 percent of the available resources. The majority of the memory and CPU resources are idle and wasted. In a...