Module 2: Infrastructure

Assessment

© 2020 VMware, Inc.

Importance
To keep the vSphere virtual infrastructure design on track, you must clearly define goals,
requirements, assumptions, risks, and constraints. These factors are the guideposts of the
design.

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2-2

Module Lessons
1. Business Objectives and Requirements
2. Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Designs
3. Overview of Architecture Frameworks

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Lesson 1: Business Objectives and
Requirements

© 2019 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Follow a proven process to design a virtualization solution
• Define customer business objectives
• Gather and analyze business and application requirements

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2-5

Design Process Overview

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Examples of Deliverables by Phase
The documentation requirements for each phase of a project vary based on the cost and
length of the project.

Phase Documentation
Assessment Current state analysis report
Conceptual design
Design Design blueprints, which include a logical design and a physical design
Deployment Installation and configuration documentation
Validation Validation plan with test results

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Project Schedule Example
Project time frames vary by engagement. This example shows the relative time frames to
complete the different phases in a project.

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Working with Stakeholders
Stakeholders should include representatives from all groups that are
affected by the design. Stakeholders can include the following
individuals:
• A project sponsor (for example, the CIO, VP of infrastructure, or IT
director)
• Virtualization architects
• Business decision makers
• Core technical teams, such as product development, server,
storage, networking, security, and backup and recovery
You interview stakeholders and conduct workshops to gather
requirements and build consensus.
Gathering requirements is an iterative process, which might require
multiple rounds of interviews.
Asking the right questions is vital, and you must gather both
functional and nonfunctional requirements.

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2-9

Identifying Business Factors That Affect Designs
When conducting interviews in the assessment phase, ask questions to learn about business
conditions and practices that affect the design. The following common factors affect the
design:
• Organizational boundaries: Physical, • Time and project urgency
political, and cultural
• Policies and procedures
• Experience with virtualization and VMware
• Training requirements
products
• Service-level agreements (SLAs) • Budget constraints

• Security and compliance requirements

• Future scaling

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Desired Business Outcomes
Begin the design process when you have a set of clear desired business outcomes.
Business objectives or desired business outcomes help to define the scope of the project and
to keep the design on track.
The following examples describe common business objectives:
• Extend the vSphere platform to other areas of the business.
• Build a strong foundation for future projects, including cloud infrastructures.
• Optimize an existing implementation to change and expand over time.
• Consolidate servers across multiple data centers.
• Virtualize the environment for business-critical applications.

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Analyzing the Current State
Use monitoring tools to do an inventory of the existing Sample Section from a
infrastructure and report the resource usage. Capacity Planner Report

For each system, capture peak and average utilization for the
following items:
• CPU
• RAM
• IOPS
• Network utilization
Use the application vendor’s requirements for proper sizing of
the application.
You can use the following tools to gather inventory and
capacity analysis information:
• vRealize Operations Manager
• Operating system-based tools
• Third-party inventory and sizing tools
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Gathering Application Requirements
Application requirements determine how to optimize the vSphere design for the applications
that run on it.
Gather application requirements from the following sources:
• Interviews with application owners
• Application SLAs
• Vendor documentation and industry averages
• VMware best practice guides
The following examples describe the type of information to gather:
• Workload characteristics (business-critical, VDI, ITaaS, and so on)
• Hardware and software requirements
• Service dependencies
• Communication requirements between applications and with the outside world
• Security zoning requirements
• Specifications for performance, availability, and so on
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Activity: Calculating the SLA (1)
In this activity, you calculate the SLA given the amount of targeted downtime.
• Calculate the constants using the following parameters:
– 24 hours x 60 minutes = 1,440 minutes per day
– 1,440 minutes x 365 days = 525,600 minutes in a given calendar year
• Determine the % uptime using the following calculations:
– If you can only sustain 5 minutes of downtime, subtract 5 minutes from 525,600.
– Divide the result by the number of minutes in the year to determine the % uptime.
– In this example, 525,595/525,600 = .99999048… = 99.999% uptime
What is the SLA for 45 minutes of downtime per month?

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Activity: Calculating the SLA (2)
What is the SLA for 45 minutes of downtime per month?
• The example parameter is 1,440 minutes per day (24 hours x 60 minutes).
• Assuming 30 days per month, you calculate 30 x 1,440 minutes in the month = 43,200
minutes.
• SLA = Total Available Time - Acceptable Downtime/Total Available Time:
– 43,200 - 45 / 43,200 = 43,155 mins
– 43,155 / 43,200 = 0.99
– SLA of 99.9%

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Lab 1: Determining Business Objectives
Identify and document the business objectives:
1. Read the Case Study
2. Determine the Business Objectives

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Review of Lab
The instructor facilitates a class discussion to answer the
following questions:
• Are you thinking of a solution?
• What are your initial thoughts?
• Do you have any concerns?
• What are the business objectives?

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Review of Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Follow a proven process to design a virtualization solution
• Define customer business objectives
• Gather and analyze business and application requirements

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2 - 18

Lesson 2: Conceptual, Logical, and
Physical Designs

© 2019 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Document design requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks
• Use a systematic method to evaluate and document design decisions
• Create a conceptual design

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The Design Model
After you collect the assessment data, you must document the
findings so that they can be referenced throughout the design
process.
Enterprise infrastructure designs follow a three-step design
model:
1. Create a conceptual design.
2. Create a logical design.
3. Create a physical design.

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Creating the Conceptual Design
The conceptual design captures the assessment findings to ensure that the solution meets
goals and requirements while staying within the constraints.

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Conceptual Design: Requirements
Business requirements are the requirements that the designed solution must meet.
The requirements describe what should be achieved in the project and what the solution looks
like.
Requirement examples:
• The business must be able to move applications between organization locations in real time.
• The organization must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
• The application availability must be 99.99%.

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Functional and Nonfunctional Requirements
A functional requirement describes what a system must do, whereas nonfunctional
requirements place constraints on how the system performs.

Requirement Definition Example

Functional The functional requirement describes A system must send an email
the behavior of the system as it whenever an order is placed.
relates to the system's functionality.
Nonfunctional The nonfunctional requirement Emails should be sent with a
describes a performance latency of no greater than 12
characteristic of the system. hours from such an activity.

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Examples of Functional Requirements
Functional requirements describe what a system or solution must do. The requirements include
the following categories:
• Business rules: For example, the architecture must support both the primary and secondary
data centers.
• Administrative functions: For example, network and security administrators must monitor
the network traffic of the desired systems.
• Authentication: For example, the system limits access to authorized users.
• Audit tracking
• Certification requirements
• Reporting requirements
• Legal or regulatory requirements

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Examples of Nonfunctional Requirements

Quality Description Measurements (Often in SLAs)

Availability Available when needed Class of nines
No single point of failure Redundancy levels (N+1, 2N, and so
Redundancy on)
Manageability Managing the infrastructure in terms Cluster nodes must scale when
of lifecycle management, scalability, compute resources are sustained at
and capacity planning 70%+ for 5 business days.
ESXi host updates must be installed
within 1 week of release.
Performance Provides the required amount of Throughput, latency, transactions
work using the least amount of time per second
and resources
Recoverability Easy to restore after an outage MTD, RTO, RPO
Security Minimizes risk and unnecessary Government regulations.
complexity Industry standards.
Defense-in-depth architecture Third-party penetration testing and
auditing must be executed against
environment quarterly with pass rate
of 80% or higher.
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Conceptual Design: Constraints
Constraints are conditions that provide boundaries to the design and often get confused with
requirements.
With a requirement, the architect can evaluate multiple options and make a design decision,
whereas a constraint dictates the answers and removes the ability of the architect to decide.
For example, a constraint is where the design must use the existing shared storage array,
whereas a requirement is where the design must use shared storage.

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Conceptual Design: Assumptions
Assumptions list the conditions that are believed to be true but are not confirmed.
All assumptions should be validated before the deployment.
An example of an assumption is that enough unused capacity is available on the storage array
for the new workloads.
Whenever you have an assumption, you must have an accompanying risk. Every risk requires
a mitigation strategy.

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Conceptual Design: Risk and Risk Mitigation
Risks are factors that might have a negative effect on the design. Risk mitigation includes the
proactive steps that you can take to accept or prevent these potential negative effects.

Mitigation Description
Action
Accept Acknowledge that a risk impacts the project. Make an explicit decision to
accept the risk without any changes to the project. Project management
approval is mandatory here.
Avoid Adjust the project scope, schedule, or constraints to minimize the effects of
the risk.
Control Take action to minimize the impact or reduce the intensification of the risk.
Transfer Implement an organizational shift in accountability, responsibility, or
authority to other stakeholders that accept the risk.
Continue Often suitable for low-impact risks. Monitor the project environment for
monitoring potentially increasing impact of the risk.

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Activity: Identifying Design Categories (1)
Identify the category for each description. Is the category an assumption, constraint,
requirement, or risk?

Description Category
Having vSphere vMotion traffic and data traffic on the same ?
physical network can lead to network disruptions if not designed
carefully.
The design must provide a centralized management console to ?
manage both data centers.
The customer provides sufficient storage for building the ?
environment.
No funding exists for a new storage array and, therefore, ?
existing storage hardware must be used.
The design must address security zone requirements for ?
management, production, dev/test, and QA workloads.

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2 - 30

Activity: Identifying Design Categories (2)
Identify the category for each description. Is the category an assumption, constraint,
requirement, or risk?

Description Category
Having vSphere vMotion traffic and data traffic on the same Risk
physical network can lead to network disruptions if not designed
carefully.
The design must provide a centralized management console to Requirement
manage both data centers.
The customer provides sufficient storage for building the Assumption
environment.
No funding exists for a new storage array and therefore, existing Constraint
storage hardware must be used.
The design must address security zone requirements for Requirement
management, production, dev/test, and QA workloads.

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Creating the Logical Design
During the logical design, you decide how to arrange all major infrastructure components to
satisfy service dependencies and requirements form the conceptual design.

The design phase is an iterative process.

vSphere design decisions are made for several
components:
• Management
• Clusters
• Storage
• Networking
• Virtual machines
• Security

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Design Decision Justifications
Designs are a series of compromises. When a design decision does not directly relate to a
requirement, use nonfunctional requirements to evaluate and justify the decision.

Principle Description
Availability How well does the solution ensure that services are available to meet
business goals and requirements?
Manageability How easily can the solution expand for future growth and ensure that
enough resources exist to meet performance SLAs?
How does this solution manage the life cycle of the components in the
environment?
Does the solution make operations simpler or more complex?
Performance How does this solution affect infrastructure performance?
Security Does this solution make the infrastructure more or less secure?
Recoverability How well does this solution meet RTO and RPO requirements?

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Design Decision Implications
You must understand the best practice and decide whether it can be included in the design. If a
best practice is not optimal, document implications and communicate risks.

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Example of a Logical Design
The logical design includes design decisions, justifications, and implications for the major
infrastructure components.
Design decisions must support the requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks that are
outlined in the conceptual design.
Assign an identification number to each design decision so that the architect and stakeholders
easily reference decisions using the ID no.

ID Design Decision Design Justification Design Implication

DD01 Two vCenter The client has a policy to separate the The client must buy a
Server instances development and test environment license for each site.
are used. from the production environment. So, However,
each environment has its own manageability is
vCenter Server instance. improved.
DD02 The vCenter The client wants to manage both sites The vCenter Server
Server instances from the same interface. The sites use Appliances must be
are in linked roles and permissions to limit access. configured for
mode. Enhanced Linked
Mode.
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Service Dependencies
The logical design must include information about the
dependencies for infrastructure and application services.
Service dependencies can be described with an entity
relationship diagram:
• Each service in the diagram can have upstream and
downstream dependencies:
– An upstream dependency is an entity that depends on the
service.
– A downstream dependency is an entity on which the
service depends.
• The arrow is a dependency connection that points to what
the service depends on:
– For example, the database server depends on the
vSphere layer.

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Example of Service Dependencies (1)
Events occurring downstream of the service affect all the components that are upstream.
The example shows application service dependencies. If the Active Directory service fails, the
web, application, and database services are impacted.

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Example of Service Dependencies (2)
For infrastructure service dependencies, when hardware fails the ESXi host is affected, which in
turn affects the Active Directory VM.

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Creating the Physical Design
The physical design provides the detailed specifications for purchasing hardware and
ultimately deploying the solution.

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Example of a Physical Design
The physical design describes implementation details based on the logical design.
More than one physical design can be built based on a good quality logical design.
Physical specifications can be recorded in a spreadsheet.

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Lab 2: Creating a Conceptual Design
Create a conceptual design using the business objectives defined in the case study:
1. Create the Conceptual Design

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Review of Lab
The instructor facilitates a class discussion to answer the
following questions:
• What are the functional business requirements?
• What are the nonfunctional business requirements?
Did you consider availability, manageability,
performance, recoverability, and security (AMPRS)?
• What are the assumptions?
• What are the risks?
• What are the constraints?

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2 - 42

Review of Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Document design requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks
• Use a systematic method to evaluate and document design decisions
• Create a conceptual design

© 2020 VMware, Inc. VMware vSphere: Design [V7] | 2 - 43

Lesson 3: Overview of Architecture
Frameworks

© 2019 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Describe the Open Group Architecture Framework principles
• Describe VMware Validated Design architecture principles
• Describe the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture principles

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About TOGAF
The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) standard is a proven enterprise architecture
methodology and framework that is used by the world’s leading organizations to improve
business efficiency. TOGAF has the following key features:
• It is a standard approach for helping with the acceptance, production, use, and maintenance
of enterprise architectures.
• It is based on an iterative process model that is supported by best practices and a reusable
set of existing architectural assets.
• The TOGAF standard can be used for developing a broad range of different enterprise
architectures.
• The TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) is used for developing an enterprise
architecture that addresses business needs.

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Architecture Development Method
ADM describes a method for developing an enterprise architecture and forms the core of
TOGAF.

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About VMware Validated Design Principles (1)
VMware Validated Design includes prescriptive blueprints with
comprehensive deployment and operational practices and has
the following advantages:
• Complete data center level design
• Standardized
• Proven and robust
• Applicable to broad use cases

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About VMware Validated Design Principles (2)

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VMware Validated Design Benefits
VMware Validated Design accelerates the time to value by reducing the deployment time and
budget.

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VMware Approach to SDDC
VMware Validated Design can be used independently or as part of VMware Cloud Foundation.

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VMware Cloud Foundation Platform
VMware Cloud Foundation is the unified SDDC platform that brings together VMware’s vSphere,
vSAN, and NSX into a natively integrated stack to deliver an enterprise-ready cloud
infrastructure for the private and public cloud:
• VMware Cloud Foundation is built on VMware Validated Design for the SDDC.
• VMware Cloud Foundation provides automated deployment and life cycle management of
the full SDDC.

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VMware Cloud Foundation OEM-Integrated Systems
VMware Cloud Foundation can be deployed as an OEM-integrated system.
OEM-integrated solutions are of the following types:
• Jointly engineered solutions
— VMware Cloud Foundation/Dell EMC VxRail
• Composable
— VMware Cloud Foundation/HPE Synergy
— VMware Cloud Foundation/Dell MX
• Integrated systems
— Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for VMware Cloud Foundation
— Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) RS
— QCT QxStack
All integrated systems are delivered ready to install at the customer site.

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VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment
VMware Cloud Foundation is not limited to on-
premises, owned, hardware:
• VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is a subscription-
based hardware IaaS built on VMware Cloud
Foundation.
• VMware Cloud on AWS is a subscription-
based VMware Cloud Foundation
deployment inside AWS regions.
• VMware works with several third-party cloud
providers to deliver infrastructure services,
based on VMware Cloud Foundation,
through a subscription model.

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Activity: Framework Comparison
As a group, consider the different frameworks and complete the table.

Bespoke VMware VCF On- VCF VCF VMware

Design Validated Premises Jointly VMware Cloud on
Design Engineered Cloud AWS
Provider
Partner
Appropriate
Use Case?
Level of Effort
Cost Model
Advantages
Disadvantage
s

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Activity: Framework Comparison Implementation
The activity does not have one correct answer, but you can align requirements with the
frameworks.

Bespoke VMware VCF On- VCF Jointly VCF VMware VMware

Design Validate Premises Engineered Cloud Provider Cloud on
d Design Partner AWS
Appropriate Org B Org E Org A Org F Org C and Org Org D
Use Case? G
Level of High Medium Medium/Low Low Low Low
Effort
Cost Model Capex Capex Capex or Capex or Opex Opex
Opex Opex

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Activity: Framework Comparison of Advantages and Disadvantages

Bespoke VMware VCF On- VCF Jointly VCF Cloud VMware Cloud
Design Validated Premise Engineered Provider on AWS
Design s Partner
Advantage Meets Accelerate Short Short time to Simplest Simplest VM
specific s time to time to value of full VM migration (hot
app/ value value of SDDC stack migration or cold) and
processing without full SDDC with lifecycle (hot or enables network
losing stack management cold) and extensions
flexibility built in enables while locating
network near AWS native
extensions services
Disadvantage Resource- Generic Specific Each joint Best pricing through term
intensive template to vSAN engineered commitments
and long does not vendor solution
time to cover all offerings specific to
value use cases one
hardware
vendor

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Review of Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Describe the Open Group Architecture Framework principles
• Describe VMware Validated Design architecture principles
• Describe the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture principles

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Key Points
• At the beginning of a design project, you must develop a high-level vision for the project,
which includes the project scope, goals, requirements, assumptions, and constraints.
• The conceptual design focuses on achieving the organization’s business objectives and
requirements.
• The logical design includes the relationships between all major infrastructure components. It
is useful for understanding and evaluating the design of the infrastructure.
• A physical design includes specific vendor and implementation details.
• Design criteria includes scalability, availability, manageability, performance, recoverability,
security, and cost.
• Educate key stakeholders and SMEs about vSphere and virtualization so that they can
provide valuable input during the design project.
• Designing the vSphere infrastructure is a balancing act between technical best practices and
the organization’s goals, requirements, and constraints.
• VMware Validated Design and VMware Cloud Foundation frameworks accelerate the time to
value on implementation projects.
Questions?
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