Designing VMware vSphere

Architecture design principles are usually developed by the VMware architect in concurrence with the enterprise CIO, Infrastructure Architecture Board, and other key business stakeholders.

Tip

From my experience, I would always urge you to have frequent meetings to observe functional requirements as much as possible. This will create a win-win situation for you and the requestor and show you how to get things done. Please follow your own approach, if it works.

Architecture design principles should be developed by the overall IT principles specific to the customer's demands, if they exist. If not, they should be selected to ensure positioning of IT strategies in line with business approaches. In nutshell, architect should aim to form an effective architecture principles that fulfills the infrastructure demands, following are high level principles that should be followed across any design:

• Design mission and plans
• Design strategic initiatives
• External influencing factors

When you release a design to the customer, keep in mind that the design must have the following principles:

• Understandable and robust
• Complete and consistent
• Stable and capable of accepting continuous requirement-based changes
• Rational and controlled technical diversity

Without the preceding principles, I wouldn't recommend you to release your design to anyone even for peer review.

For every design, irrespective of the product that you are about to design, try the following approach; it should work well but if required I would recommend you make changes to the approach.

The following approach is called PPP, which will focus on people's requirements, the product's capacity, and the process that helps to bridge the gap between the product capacity and people requirements:

The preceding diagram illustrates three entities that should be considered while designing VMware vSphere infrastructure.

Tip

Please keep in mind that your design is just a product designed by a process that is based on people's needs.

In the end, using this unified framework will aid you in getting rid of any known risks and its implications.

Functional requirements should be meaningful; while designing, please make sure there is a meaning to your design. Selecting VMware vSphere from other competitors should not be a random pick, you should always list the benefits of VMware vSphere. Some of them are as follows:

• Server consolidation and easy hardware changes
• Dynamic provisioning of resources to your compute node
• Templates, snapshots, vMotion, DRS, DPM, High Availability, fault tolerance, auto monitoring, and solutions for warnings and alerts
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), building a disaster recovery site, fast deployments, and decommissions

The PPP framework

Let's explore the components that integrate to form the PPP framework. Always keep in mind that the design should consist of people, processes, and products that meet the unified functional requirements and performance benchmark. Always expect the unexpected. Without these metrics, your design is incomplete; PPP always retains its own decision metrics. What does it do, who does it, and how is it done? We will see the answers in the following diagrams:

The PPP Framework helps you to get started with requirements gathering, design vision, business architecture, infrastructure architecture, opportunities and solutions, migration planning, fixing the tone for implementing and design governance. The following table illustrates the essentials of the three-dimensional approach and the basic questions that are required to be answered before you start designing or documenting about designing, which will in turn help to understand the real requirements for a specific design:

Phase	Description	Key components
Product	Results of what?	In what hardware will the VM reside? What kind of CPU is required? What is the quantity of CPU, RAM, storage per host/VM? What kind of storage is required? What kind of network is required? What are the standard applications that need to be rolled out? What kind of power and cooling are required? How much rack and floor space is demanded?
People	Results of who?	Who is responsible for infrastructure provisioning? Who manages the data center and supplies the power? Who is responsible for implementation of the hardware and software patches? Who is responsible for storage and back up? Who is responsible for security and hardware support?
Process	Results of how?	How should we manage the virtual infrastructure? How should we manage hosted VMs? How should we provision VM on demand? How should a DR site be active during a primary site failure? How should we provision storage and backup? How should we take snapshots of VMs? How should we monitor and perform periodic health checks?

Before we start to apply the PPP framework on VMware vSphere, we will discuss the list of challenges and encounters faced on the virtual infrastructure.