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CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO DESIGNING VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS
The Operational Facet
The operational facet of a VMware vSphere design answers questions focused on “how,” such as
those illustrated in Figure 1.7.
Figure 1.7
Decisions about
how you’ll operate
a VMware vSphere
environment fall
into the operational
facet.
Technical
Decisions About How
- How will hosts be managed?
- How will VMs be created?
- How will backups be made?
- How will storage be provisioned?
- How will new VLANs be added?
- How will I fail over to the DR site?
- How will compliance be verified?
Organizational
Operational
REQUIREMENTS
FUNCTIONAL
As with the organizational facet, you might ask, “Why would I need to defi ne operational
procedures in a VMware vSphere design? Should these sorts of operations be tasks the organi-
zation already knows how to do?”
In the event of an organization that is new to virtualization, the answer to that question is no.
Virtualization changes the way the data center operates — and the customer or company imple-
menting virtualization for the fi rst time must have these operational decisions spelled out in the
design.
Even for organizations that are familiar with virtualization, the operational facet is still a
critical part of a complete and comprehensive VMware vSphere design. It’s possible, even likely,
that the “what” decisions made in the technical facet of this design will be different than the
“what” decisions made in the technical facet of earlier designs. Server models change. Storage
vendors introduce new products with new functionality — and new operational requirements.
Networking vendors change the way their products work over time. All of these factors add
up to a need to include operational information in every design to ensure that the organization
implementing the design has the information it needs to operate the environment.
As an example, consider an organization that adopted virtualization a couple of years ago.
It deployed VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) on HP ProLiant rack-mounted servers attached to
a NetApp storage array via Fibre Channel (FC). Now, the company is implementing VMware
vSphere 4.1 on Cisco UCS attached to an EMC storage array via FC over Ethernet (FCoE). Do you
think the operational procedures from the last implementation will be the same as the opera-
tional procedures from this new implementation? No, of course not. Just as technology changes
over time, operations change over time as well. This is why the operational aspect is important
not only for new VMware vSphere users but for existing users as well.
Before we wrap up this chapter and start a more detailed look at the decision of whether to
use VMware ESX or VMware ESXi in Chapter 2, we want to discuss one more area. That’s the
process of VMware vSphere design, and it’s the focus of the next section.
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