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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Over 75 practical recipes to confidently design an efficient virtual datacenter with VMware vSphere 6.x
About This Book
- 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
Who This Book Is 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
In Detail
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.
Style and Approach
The book follows a recipe-based approach that consists of practical recipes to effectively design a virtual data center.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook Second Edition
VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook Second Edition
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: January 2014
Second published: June 2016
Production reference: 1220616
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78528-346-8
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Credits
Author
Hersey Cartwright
Reviewer
Kim Bottu
Commissioning Editor
Pratik Shah
Acquisition Editor
Vinay Argekar
Content Development Editor
Viranchi Shetty
Technical Editor
Dhiraj Chandanshive
Copy Editor
Stuti Srivastava
Project Coordinator
Izzat Contractor
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Mariammal Chettiyar
Graphics
Jason Monteiro
Kirk D'Penha
Production Coordinator
Melwyn Dsa
Cover Work
Melwyn Dsa
About the Author
Hersey Cartwright has worked in the technology industry since 1996 in many roles, from help desk support to IT management. He first started working with VMware technologies in 2006. He is currently a solutions architect for SimpliVity, where he designs, sells, and supports VMware vSphere enterprise environments running on the SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) platform. He has experience of working with a wide variety of server and storage platforms.
In 2012, he began preparing to submit a design to defend for his VMware Certified Design Expert. In February 2013, he successfully completed his defense and obtained VCDX. His VCDX number is #128.
Since January 2011, he has been an instructor with the VMware IT Academy at Tidewater Community college where he teaches vSphere 5 and vSphere 6 classes. He designed and implemented the lab environment that is used by students in the virtualization and security programs offered at the Chesapeake Campus of Tidewater Community College. He enjoys teaching and learns a lot from teaching others about the benefits of virtualization.
He actively participates in the VMware community, and he has been awarded the vExpert title every year since 2012. He has presented multiple ProfessionalVMware.com vBrownBags on vSphere administration, vSphere design, and vSphere disaster recovery. He regularly blogs about virtualization and other technologies at http://www.vhersey.com/.
I want to thank my family, especially my wife Sandy, for putting up with the long hours I work, listening to the noisy lab gear in the closet, and supporting everything I do. You guys are my everything, and your support and encouragement means the world to me.
I also want to thank the great VMware community. There are a lot of great folks there that are always willing to help out. A special thanks to the #vCoffee crew on Twitter: Shane, Susan, Matt, and Todd.
About the Reviewer
Kim Bottu is a virtualization engineer in the EMEA region for an international Biglaw firm, where he focuses on virtual datacenter operations, optimization, and design. In his current role, he takes care of the consolidated virtual datacenters in Asia and Europe, and he is the SME for the EMEA Litigation virtual datacenters.
He holds the following certifications and honors: VCA-NV, VCP5-DCV, VCP6-DCV, and VCAP5-DCD, and has been named vExpert 2016.
Kim currently lives in Belgium and is a proud dad of his daughter named Zoey. In his spare time you might find him playing with his daughter, reading books, or riding his mountain bike.
He can be reached at www.vMusketeers.com.
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Preface
VMware is the industry leader for datacenter virtualization. This second edition of the Datacenter Design Cookbook covers VMware's vSphere 6.x suite of products, which provide a robust and resilient platform to virtualize server and application workloads. The features available in vSphere 6.x simplify management, increase availability, provide security, and guarantee the performance of workloads deployed in the virtualized datacenter.
The VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook Second Edition provides recipes to create a virtual datacenter design using the features of vSphere 6.x. It does this by guiding you through the process of identifying the design factors and applying them to the logical and physical design process.
This book steps through the design process from beginning to end, from the discovery process, to creating the conceptual design, to calculating the resource requirements of the logical storage, compute, and network design, to mapping the logical requirements to a physical design, and finally creating the design documentation.
This book's recipes provide guidance for making design decisions to ensure the successful creation, and ultimately the successful implementation, of a VMware vSphere 6.x virtual datacenter design.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Virtual Datacenter, provides an introduction to the benefits of the virtual datacenter, VMware vSphere products, and basic virtualization concepts. This chapter identifies the differences between a datacenter administrator and a datacenter architect. An overview of the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacenter Design (VCAP-DCD) certification is also covered.
Chapter 2, The Discovery Process, explains how to identify stakeholders, conduct stakeholder interviews, and perform technical assessments in order to discover the business and technical goals of a virtualization project. This chapter covers how to use tools, VMware Capacity Planner, Windows Performance Monitor, and vRealize Operations Manager to collect resource information during the discovery process.
Chapter 3, The Design Factors, explains how to identify and document the design requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks. This chapter details how to use the design factors to create the conceptual design.
Chapter 4, vSphere Management Design, describes the vCenter Server components and their dependencies. This chapter contains recipes to determine the vCenter Server deployment option, the Windows server or virtual appliance that you need to use, and determine the type of database that you need to use, based on the deployment size.
Chapter 5, vSphere Storage Design, covers logical storage design. Recipes are included to calculate the storage capacity and performance requirements for the logical storage design. This chapter covers the details of selecting the correct RAID level and storage connectivity to support a design. Recipes for VSAN and VVOLs are provided in this chapter.
Chapter 6, vSphere Network Design, provides details on logical network design. This chapter explains how to calculate bandwidth requirements to support a vSphere design. Details on selecting a virtual switch topology, designing for network availability, and the network requirements to support vMotion and IP connected storage are also covered.
Chapter 7, vSphere Compute Design, provides recipes to calculate the CPU and memory requirements to create the logical compute design. This chapter also covers cluster design considerations for High Availability (HA) and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).
Chapter 8, vSphere Physical Design, explains how to satisfy the design factors by mapping the logical management, storage, network, and compute designs to hardware to create the physical vSphere design. The chapter also provides details of creating a custom installation ISO to install ESXi and the best practices for host BIOS configurations.
Chapter 9, Virtual Machine Design, looks at the design of virtual machines and application workloads running in the virtual datacenter. Recipes are provided to right-size virtual machine resources, enable the ability to add virtual machine resources, and create virtual machine templates. This chapter details the use of affinity and anti-affinity rules to improve application efficiency and availability. Converting or migrating physical servers to virtual machines is also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 10, vSphere Security Design, provides an overview of vSphere features available to provide security in the virtual datacenter. Recipes covering authentication, access controls, and security hardening that must be incorporated into the datacenter design to secure the vSphere environment.
Chapter 11, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, covers options for backup, recovery, and continued operations in the event of system failure. This chapter covers how to create backups of vSphere configurations so that they can be quickly restored. The protection of virtual machines using VMware products for backup and replication is also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 12, Design Documentation, covers documenting a vSphere design. Documentation includes the Architecture Design Document, the Implementation Plan, the Installation Guide, the Validation and Test Plan, and the Operational Procedures. This chapter also provides tips to present the design to stakeholders and using the design documentation to implement the design.
What you need for this book
The following are the software requirements for this book:
Who this book is for
If you are an administrator or consultant interested in designing virtualized datacenter environments using VMware vSphere 5.x and the supporting components, then this book is for you. This book will help both new and experienced architects deliver professional VMware vSphere virtual datacenter designs.
Sections
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
Getting ready
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
How to do it…
This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.
How it works…
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
There's more…
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
See also
This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "VIB files have the .vib file extension."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The Send a notification email or Send a notification trap action can be configured in the alarm Actions section."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Downloading the color images of this book
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Errata
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. The Virtual Datacenter
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Introduction
This chapter focuses on many of the basic concepts and benefits of virtualization. It provides a quick overview of VMware virtualization, introduces the virtual datacenter architect, and lays some of the groundwork necessary to create and implement a successful virtual datacenter design using VMware vSphere 6.x.
We will also explore the VMware Certified Advanced Professional-Datacenter Virtualization (VCAP6-DCV) design exam and the new VMware Certified Implementation Expert-Datacenter Virtualization (VCIX6-DCV) certification, including a few tips that should help you prepare to successfully complete the exam and certification.
Then, we will look at some of the new features of vSphere 6. This section will include where to find the current release notes and the latest vSphere product documentation.
Finally, we will take a high-level look at the process of planning an upgrade to an existing vSphere deployment to vSphere 6.
If you are already familiar with virtualization, this chapter will provide a review of many of the benefits and technologies of virtualization.
Since the focus of this book is on design, we will not go into great detail discussing the specifics of how to configure resources in a virtual datacenter. Most of you probably already have a good understanding of VMware's virtualization architecture. So, this section will provide just a basic overview of the key VMware components that are the building blocks to the virtual datacenter.
Virtualization creates a layer of abstraction between the physical hardware and the virtual machines that run on it. Virtual hardware is presented to the virtual machine, granting access to the underlying physical hardware, which is scheduled by the hypervisor's kernel. The hypervisor separates the physical hardware from the virtual machine, as shown in the following diagram:
The hypervisor separates the physical hardware from the virtual machine
The new release of vSphere 6 does not change the design process or the design methodologies. The new functions and features of the release provide an architect with more tools to satisfy design requirements.
The hypervisor
At the core of any virtualization platform is the hypervisor. The VMware hypervisor is named vSphere ESXi, simply referred to as ESXi. ESXi is a Type 1 or bare-metal hypervisor. This means it runs directly on the host's hardware to present virtual hardware to the virtual machines. In turn, the hypervisor schedules access to the physical hardware of the hosts.
ESXi allows multiple virtual machines with a variety of operating systems to run simultaneously, sharing the resources of the underlying physical hardware. Access to physical resources, such as memory, CPU, storage, and network, used by the virtual machines is managed by the scheduler or the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) provided by ESXi. The resources presented to the virtual machines can be overcommitted. This means more resources than are available can be allocated to the virtual machines on the physical hardware. Advanced memory sharing and reclamation techniques, such as Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and ballooning, along with CPU scheduling, allow for overcommitment of these resources, resulting in greater virtual to physical consolidation ratios.
ESXi 6 is a 64-bit hypervisor that must be run on a 64-bit hardware. An ESXi 6 installation requires at least 1 GB of disk space for installation. It can be installed on a hard disk locally, on a USB device, on a Logical Unit Number (LUN), on a Storage Area Network (SAN), or can be deployed stateless on hosts with no storage using Auto Deploy. The small footprint of an ESXi installation provides a reduction in the management overhead associated with patching and security hardening.
With the release of vSphere 5.0, VMware retired the ESX hypervisor. ESX had a separate Linux-based service console for the management interface of the hypervisor. Management functions were provided by agents running in the service console. The service console has since been removed from ESXi, and agents now run directly on ESXi's VMkernel.
To manage a standalone host running ESXi, a Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) is provided for basic configuration and troubleshooting. A shell is available that can either be accessed locally from the console or remotely using Secure Shell (SSH). esxcli and other commands can be used in the shell to provide advanced configuration options.
An ESXi host can also be accessed directly using the vSphere client. The ESXi DCUI is shown in the following screenshot:
ESXi's DCUI
Tip
The DCUI can be accessed remotely using SSH by typing the dcui command in the prompt. Press Ctrl + C to exit the remote DCUI session.
Virtual machines
A virtual machine is a software computer that runs a guest operating system. Virtual machines comprise a set of configuration files and data files stored on local or remote storage. These configuration files contain information about the virtual hardware presented to the virtual machine. This virtual hardware includes the CPU, RAM, disk controllers, removable devices, and so on. It emulates the same functionality as the physical hardware. The following screenshot depicts the virtual machine files that are stored on a shared Network File System (NFS) data store:
Virtual machine files stored on a shared NFS data store displayed using the vSphere web client
The files that make up a virtual machine are typically stored in a directory set aside for the particular virtual machine they represent. These files include the configuration file, virtual disk files, NVRAM file, and virtual machine log files.
The following table lists the common virtual machine file extensions along with a description of each:
File extension
Description
.vmx
This is a virtual machine configuration file. It contains the configurations of the virtual hardware that is presented to the virtual machine.
.vmdk
This is a virtual disk descriptor file. It contains a header and other information pertaining to the virtual disk.
-flat.vmdk
This is a preallocated virtual disk. It contains the content or data on the disk used by the virtual machine.
.nvram
This is a file that stores the state of a virtual machine's Basic Input Output System (BIOS) or Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) configurations.
.vswp
This is a virtual machine swap file. It gets created when a virtual machine is powered on. The size of this file is equal to the amount of memory allocated minus any memory reservations.
.log
This is a virtual machine logfile.
.vmsd
This is a virtual machine file used with snapshots to store data about each snapshot active on a virtual machine.
.vmsn
This is a virtual machine snapshot data file.
Virtual machines can be deployed using a variety of methods as follows:
When a new virtual machine is created, a guest operating system can be installed on the virtual machine. VMware vSphere 6 supports more than 80 different guest operating systems. These include many versions of the Windows server and desktop operating systems, many distributions and versions of Linux and Unix operating systems, and Apple Mac OS operating systems.
Virtual appliances are preconfigured virtual machines that can be imported to the virtual environment. A virtual appliance can comprise a single virtual machine or a group of virtual machines with all the components required to support an application. The virtual machines in a virtual appliance are preloaded with guest operating systems, and the applications they run are normally preconfigured and optimized to run in a virtual environment.
Since virtual machines are just a collection of files on a disk, they become portable. Virtual machines can be easily moved from one location to another by simply moving or copying the associated files. Using VMware vSphere features such as vMotion, Enhanced vMotion, or Storage vMotion, virtual machines can be migrated from host to host or data store to data store while they are running. Virtual machines can also be exported to an OVF or OVA to be imported into another VMware vSphere environment.
Virtual infrastructure management
VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized management interface to manage and configure groups of ESXi hosts in the virtualized datacenter. The vCenter Server is required to configure and control many advanced features, such as the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage DRS, and VMware High Availability (HA). The vCenter Server is accessed using either the Windows vSphere client or the vSphere web client. Many vendors provide plugins that can be installed to allow third-party storage, network, and compute resources to be managed using the vSphere client or vSphere web client.
Tip
The C#, or Windows vSphere client, is still available in vSphere 6. Since the release of vSphere 5.5, access to, and the configuration of, new features is only available using the vSphere web client. The vSphere web client can be accessed at https://FQDN_or_IP_of_vCenter_Server:9443/.
The vCenter Server can be installed on a 64-bit Windows server. It can be run on dedicated physical hardware or as a virtual machine. When the vCenter Server is deployed on the Windows server, it requires either the embedded vPostgres database, a Microsoft SQL database, or an Oracle database to store configuration and performance information. IBM DB2 databases are supported with vSphere 5.1, but this support was removed in vSphere 5.5.
With the release of vCenter 6, the Microsoft SQL Express database is no longer used as the embedded database. vPostgres is now used as the embedded database for small deployments. The vPostgres database on a Windows server can be used to support environments of fewer than 20 hosts and 200 virtual machines. When upgrading to vCenter 6, if the previous version was using the Microsoft SQL Express database, the database will be converted to the embedded vPostgres database as part of the upgrade.
Another option to deploy the vCenter Server is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). The VCSA is a preconfigured, Linux-based virtual machine, preinstalled with the vCenter Server components. The appliance includes an embedded vPostgres database that supports up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. The embedded vPostgres database is suitable for almost all deployments, using an external Oracle database is also supported.
Several other management and automation tools are available to aid the day-to-day administration of a vSphere environment. One of them is the vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI). Another one is the vSphere PowerCLI, which provides a Windows PowerShell interface. The vRealize Orchestrator can be used to automate tasks, and the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) is a Linux-based virtual appliance that is used to run management and automation scripts against hosts. These tools allow an administrator to use command-line utilities to manage hosts from remote workstations.
VMware provides a suite of other products that benefits the virtualized datacenter. These datacenter products, such as VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), can each be leveraged in the virtual datacenter to meet specific requirements related to management, disaster recovery, and cloud services. At the core of these products is vSphere suite, which includes ESXi, the vCenter Server, and the core supporting components.
Understanding the benefits of virtualization
The following table provides a matrix of some of the core VMware technologies and the benefits that can be realized using them. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all VMware technologies and features, but it provides an insight into many of the technologies commonly deployed in the enterprise virtual datacenter:
VMware technology
Primary benefits
Description
vSphere ESXi
Server consolidation
Resource efficiency
ESXi is VMware's bare-metal hypervisor that hosts virtual machines, also known as guests, and schedules virtual hardware access to physical resources.
vSphere HA
Increased availability
HA restarts virtual machines in the event of a host failure. It also monitors and restarts the virtual machines in the event of a guest operating system failure.
vMotion and vSphere DRS
Resource efficiency
Increased availability
vMotion allows virtual machines to be live-migrated between hosts in a virtual datacenter. DRS determines the initial placement of the virtual machine on the host resources within a cluster and makes recommendations, or automatically migrates the virtual machines to balance resources across all hosts in a cluster.
Resource pools
Resource efficiency
These are used to guarantee, reserve, or limit the virtual machine's CPU, memory, and disk resources.
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)
Increased availability
FT provides 100 percent uptime for a virtual machine in the event of a host hardware failure. It creates a secondary virtual machine that mirrors all the operations of the primary. In the event of a hardware failure, the secondary virtual machine becomes the primary and a new secondary is created.
Thin provisioning
Resource efficiency
This allows for storage to be overprovisioned by presenting the configured space to a virtual machine but only consuming the space on the disk that the guest actually requires.
Hot add CPU and memory
Resource efficiency
Scalability
This allows for the addition of CPU and memory resources to a virtual machine while the virtual machine is running.
Storage vMotion
Resource efficiency
This moves virtual machine configuration files and disks between storage locations that have been presented to a host.
vSphere Data Protection (VDP)
Disaster recovery
This provides agentless image-level backup and recovery of virtual machines.
vSphere Replication
Disaster recovery
This features provides the ability to replicate virtual machines between sites.
vCenter Server
Simplified management
This provides a single management interface to configure and monitor the resources available to virtual datacenters.
vCenter Server Linked Mode
Simplified management
This links multiple vCenter Servers together to allow them to be managed from a single client.
Host Profiles
Simplified management
This maintains consistent configuration and configuration compliance across all the hosts in the environment.
There are many others, and each technology or feature may also have its own set of requirements that must be met in order to be implemented. The purpose here is to show how features or technologies can be mapped to benefits, which can then be mapped to requirements and ultimately mapped into a design. This is helpful in ensuring that the benefits and technologies provided by virtualization satisfy the design requirements.
Identifying when not to virtualize
Not all applications or server workloads are good candidates for virtualization. It is important that these workloads are identified early on in the design process.
There are a number of reasons a server or application may not be suitable for virtualization. Some of these include the following:
A common reason to not virtualize an application or workload is the reluctance of a vendor to support their application in a virtual environment. As virtualization has become more common in the enterprise datacenter, this has become uncommon. However, there are still application vendors that will not support their products once virtualized.
Software and operating systems licensing in a virtual environment can also be a challenge, especially when it comes to conversions from physical server to virtual machine. Many physical servers are purchased with Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) licenses, and these licenses, in most cases, cannot be transferred to a virtual environment. Also, many licenses are tied to hardware-specific information, such as interface MAC addresses or drive signatures. Licensing issues can usually be overcome. Many times, the primary risk becomes the cost of upgrading or acquiring new licensing. As with other potential design risks, it is important that any issues and the potential impact of licensing on the design be identified early on in the design process.
Some applications may require the use of specialized hardware. Fax boards, serial ports, and security dongles are common examples. There are ways to provide solutions for many of these. However, often, with the risks associated with the ability to support the application or with the loss of one or more of the potential benefits of virtualizing the application, the better solution may be to leave the application on dedicated physical hardware. Again, it is important that these types of applications be identified very early on in the design process.
Physical servers configured with a large amount of CPU and memory resources where applications are consuming a large amount of these resources may not be good candidates for virtualization. This also holds true for applications with high network utilization and large storage I/O requirements. vSphere 6.0 supports virtual machines configured with up to 128 Virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4 TB of memory, but the high utilization of these configured resources can have a negative impact on other workloads in the virtual environment. These high-utilization workloads will also require more resources to be reserved for failover. The benefits of virtualizing resource-intensive applications must be weighed against the impact placed on the environment. In some cases, it may be better to leave these applications on dedicated physical hardware.
Many administrators may lack knowledge of the benefits or skills to manage a virtualized datacenter. The administrator of a virtual environment must be well-versed with storage, networking, and virtualization in order to successfully configure, maintain, and monitor a virtual environment. Though this may not necessarily be a reason not to leverage the benefits of a virtualized environment, it can be a substantial risk to the acceptance of a design and its implementation. This is especially true with smaller IT departments where the roles of the server, application, storage, and network administrators are combined.
Each of these can introduce risks in the design. We will discuss how risk impacts the design process in much more detail in Chapter 2, The Discovery Process, and Chapter 3, The Design Factors.
Becoming a virtual datacenter architect
The virtual datacenter architect, or simply the architect, is someone who identifies requirements, designs a virtualization solution to meet those requirements, and then oversees the implementation of the solution. Sounds easy enough, right?
