Datasheet

CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO DESIGNING VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS

of transactions per second (TPS). That information translates into storage requirements that

will dictate the RAID level, array type, storage protocol, and capacity in I/O operations per

second (IOPS).

Although reviewing documentation can be helpful, it’s unlikely that you’ll ﬁ nd all the

information you need in a company’s documentation. If the organization is like a lot of others,

documentation is sparse and incomplete. In these instances, you’ll need to gather information

by going straight to the source: the people in the organization.

PER FORMING INTERVIEWS

Interviewing individuals in the organization or company that is implementing VMware

vSphere is the second major way to gather the information necessary to understand the func-

tional requirements.

Generally speaking, unless you’ve already gotten the information you need from somewhere

else (and even then, you might want to conduct interviews to ensure that you haven’t missed

something), you’ll want to interview the following people in the organization:

u Desktop support staff

u Server administrators

u Network administrators

u Sto rage administrators

u Security managers

u Compliance/legal staff

u Application owners

u Business leaders

u Project managers or project sponsors/owners

u Executive/managerial sponsors

u Architects

Not all designs or situations require you to speak with all these individuals, so be selective

but thorough.

These individuals can provide you with information about the applications currently sup-

ported in the environment, the requirements of the applications, service level agreements

(SLAs) that are in place, dependencies between different applications or services in the data

center, plans for future trends or projects, compliance or regulatory requirements, business-

level requirements, ﬁ nancial objectives, and other facts that can be used to derive the functional

requirements for the design.

Assessing the Environment

After you’ve gathered the information necessary to determine the design’s functional require-

ments, it’s then necessary to assess the current environment. Assessing the environment ﬁ lls a

couple of purposes:

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