Datasheet

THE FACETS OF VSPHERE DESIGN
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This is, of course, just a small list to get you started thinking about the detail you should pro-
vide when crafting a design for a VMware vSphere environment. Subsequent chapters examine
each of these areas in much more detail. For example, VMware vSphere networking is covered
in detail in Chapter 5, “Designing Your Network”; Chapter 6, “Shared Storage,” discusses
shared storage in more depth.
A complete and thorough design addresses more than just the technical facet, though. Your
design should also address the organizational facet.
The Organizational Facet
Although the technical facet is important, equally as important is the organizational facet. It’s con-
cerned with questions centered on “who,” as you can see in Figure 1.6.
Figure 1.6
The “who”-focused
decisions of a
VMware vSphere
design fall into
the organizational
facet.
Technical
Decisions About Who
- Who manages the environment?
- Who provisions storage?
- Who configures the network?
- Who’s responsible for backups?
- Who will handle troubleshooting?
- Who will patch VMs?
- Who is responsible for security?
Organizational
Operational
REQUIREMENTS
FUNCTIONAL
You might initially think that these “who”-focused questions aren’t important or aren’t your
responsibility. Aren’t these the sort of decisions that should be made by the customer? In a cer-
tain respect, yes — these decisions are driven by the functional requirements every bit as much
as the “what” questions in the technical facet. As you’ll see later in this chapter, in the section
“The Process of Design,” gathering the functional requirements from the customer or organiza-
tion (if it’s your own organization) means gathering information about who is responsible for
the various tasks within a virtualized infrastructure.
The other thing to consider regarding these “who”-focused questions, though, is the fact that
the customer or company might not know or understand who will be responsible for certain
aspects of the design. For organizations that are new to virtualization, the convergence of server
administrators, network administrators, storage administrators, and security administrators
often means they’re confused and don’t understand who can or should be responsible for the
different areas of the new VMware vSphere environment. By embedding the answers to these
questions in your design, you can help the customer (or your own organization) better under-
stand how these responsibilities should be divided and who should be responsible for each area.
The fi nal facet of VMware vSphere design addresses an equally important but often over-
looked type of question: how should the environment be operated? This is the operational facet,
and we discuss it in the next section.
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