In this article by Puthiyavan Udayakumar, author of the book VMware vSphere Design Essentials, we will cover the following topics:

• Essentials of designing VMware vSphere
• The PPP framework
• The challenges and encounters faced on virtual infrastructure

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Let’s get started with understanding the essentials of designing VMware vSphere. Designing is nothing but assembling and integrating VMware vSphere infrastructure components together to form the baseline for a virtualized datacenter. It has the following benefits:

• Saves power consumption
• Decreases the datacenter footprint and helps towards server consolidation
• Fastest server provisioning
• On-demand QA lab environments
• Decreases hardware vendor dependency
• Aids to move to the cloud
• Greater savings and affordability
• Superior security and High Availability

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.

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.

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:

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.

List of challenges and encounters faced on the virtual infrastructure

In this section, we will see a list of challenges and encounters faced with virtual infrastructure due to the simple reason that we fail to capture the functional and non-functional demands of business users, or do not understand the fit-for-purpose concept:

• Resource Estimate Misfire: If you underestimate the amount of memory required up-front, you could change the number of VMs you attempt to run on the VMware ESXi host hardware.
• Resource unavailability: Without capacity management and configuration management, you cannot create dozens or hundreds of VMs on a single host. Some of the VMs could consume all resources, leaving other VMs unknown.
• High utilization: An army of VMs can also throw workflows off-balance due to the complexities they can bring to provisioning and operational tasks.
• Business continuity: Unlike a PC environment, VMs cannot be backed up to an actual hard drive. This is why 80 percent of IT professionals believe that virtualization backup is a great technological challenge.
• Security: More than six out of ten IT professionals believe that data protection is a top technological challenge.
• Backward compatibility: This is especially challenging for certain apps and systems that are dependent on legacy systems.
• Monitoring performance: Unlike physical servers, you cannot monitor the performance of VMs with common hardware resources such as CPU, memory, and storage.
• Restriction of licensing: Before you install software on virtual machines, read the license agreements; they might not support this; hence, by hosting on VMs, you might violate the agreement.
• Sizing the database and mailbox: Proper sizing of databases and mailboxes is really critical to the organization’s communication systems and for applications.
• Poor design of storage and network: A poor storage design or a networking design resulting from a failure to properly involve the required teams within an organization is a sure-fire way to ensure that this design isn’t successful.

Summary

In this article we covered a brief introduction of the essentials of designing VMware vSphere which focused on the PPP framework. We also had look over the challenges and encounters faced on the virtual infrastructure.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores [article]
• Networking Performance Design [article]
• The Design Documentation [article]