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.

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

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

Identify the key stakeholders, including the following:

• Project sponsors
• Application owners and providers
• System, network, and storage administrators
• Application users

Understanding the role of the stakeholders helps an architect to identify who can provide the information necessary to...

During the discovery process, the primary source of information will be 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.

The 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...

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.

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...

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.

In this example, Microsoft Windows perfmon is used to collect disk I/O metrics, with 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 New | Data Collector to the Data Collector Set, as shown in the following screenshot:

The VMware Optimization Assessment (VOA) is an enhanced evaluation of vRealize Operations Manager, which includes reports providing information about the configuration, capacity, and performance of a vSphere environment. This information is useful for an administrator or architect validating an existing vSphere deployment or planning an expansion to an existing vSphere deployment.

The VOA will provide useful insights into a virtual environment by providing detail analytics, including the following:

• Providing information on misconfigured clusters, hosts, and virtual machines
• Identifying potential performance problems with root cause analysis
• Analyzing virtual machine resources to identify undersized and/or oversized virtual machines, providing opportunities to attain a right-size environment

The information gathered during a VOA will...

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

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:

• Physical infrastructure dependencies
• Application and service dependencies