VSphere Design best practices : apply industry-accepted best practices to design reliable high-performance datacenters for your business needs

182 Pages·2014·1.98 MB·English

by  Bolander

Table of Contents
vSphere Design Best Practices
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
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Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. Virtual Data Center Design
Virtual Data Center design principles
Best practices
Designing Virtual Data Center
VMware vCenter components
Choosing a platform for your vCenter server
Using the vCenter server appliance
Sizing your vCenter server
Choosing your vCenter database
vSphere clustering – HA and DRS
Host considerations
Network considerations
Storage considerations
Cluster considerations
Admission control
Summary
2. Hypervisor Design
ESXi hardware design
CPU considerations
Memory and NUMA considerations
Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) considerations
Considerations for Java virtual machines (JVMs)
Network interface card considerations
Hypervisor storage components
Stateless host design
Scale-Up and Scale-Out designs
Summary
3. Storage Design
Storage protocols
Fibre Channel (FC)
iSCSI
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
NFS
Virtual machine filesystems
VMFS
RDM
NFS
Designing storage
Local storage considerations
Datastore and cluster design
VMware storage features
Configurable storage features
SIOC
Configuring the multipathing path selection policy
Provisioning
Summary
4. Network Design
Introducing vSphere switching
vNetwork Standard Switches (vSS)
vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDS)
Common networking design considerations
Best practices to implement in your design
Implementing Network I/O Control (NIOC)
Providing network redundancy, resiliency, and throughput
Physical switches and adapters
ESXi host hardware
Considerations when using IP storage
Separating your traffic
Validating your storage configurations
Summary
5. Virtual Machine Design
Virtual machine resources and templates
Best practices for virtual machines and templates
Over-allocation can be a painful proposition
Physical to virtual migrations
Multi-vCPU considerations
Shares, limits, and reservations
Configuring shares
Limits
Reservations
Causes of virtual machine performance problems
CPU performance issues
Memory performance issues
Storage performance issues
Network performance issues
Summary
6. Business Critical Applications
Special considerations for tier 1 applications
Starting simple
Workload profiles
Designing for Microsoft Exchange
Considering Microsoft SQL server
HA, DRS, and vMotion considerations
Resource considerations
Ensuring high availability and application resiliency
Enabling CPU Hot Add in vSphere client
The vCenter operations manager dashboard
Other business critical application resources
Summary
7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
The benefits of disaster avoidance
Designing backup strategies
Designing for RPO and RTO requirements
Choosing replication technologies
VMware vSphere Replication
Storage-based replication
Mixing replication solutions
Planning and testing the DR strategy
Summary
A. vSphere Automation Tools
Introducing VMware vCenter Orchestrator
Introducing VMware vCloud Automation Center
Unified IT service catalog
Advanced Service Designer
Multivendor interoperability
Designing for automation and XaaS
Summary
B. Certification Resources
VMware Certification Roadmap
Associate exams
Professional exams
Advanced professional exams
Expert-level defense
VMware vExpert program
Evangelist path
Customer path
VMware Partner Network (VPN) path
Recommended reading, blogs, and podcasts
Exam and study tips
Summary
Index
vSphere Design Best Practices
vSphere Design Best Practices
Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
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publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical
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accuracy of the information presented. However, the information
contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.
Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors
will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused
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the accuracy of this information.
First published: May 2014
Production Reference: 1200514
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78217-626-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Abhishek Dhir (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Authors
Brian Bolander
Christopher Kusek
Reviewers
Andy Grant
Muhammad Zeeshan Munir
Prasenjit Sarkar
Commissioning Editor
Rebecca Youe
Acquisition Editor
Meeta Rajani
Content Development Editor
Sharvari Tawde
Technical Editors
Rosmy George
Manal Pednekar
Copy Editor
Laxmi Subramanian
Project Coordinator
Melita Lobo
Proofreader
Simran Bhogal
Indexers
Mariammal Chettiyar
Tejal Soni
Graphics
Valentina Dsilva
Abhinash Sahu
Production Coordinator
Alwin Roy
Cover Work
Alwin Roy
About the Authors
Brian Bolander spent 13 years on active duty in the United States Air
Force. A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, he was honorably
discharged in 2005. He immediately returned to Afghanistan and worked
on datacenter operations for the US Department of Defense (DoD) at
various locations in southwest Asia. Invited to join a select team of
internal consultants and troubleshooters responsible for operations in five
countries, he was also the project manager for what was then the largest
datacenter built in Afghanistan.
After leaving Afghanistan in 2011, he managed IT operations in a DoD
datacenter in the San Francisco Bay Area. His team was responsible for
dozens of multimillion dollar programs running on VMware and
supporting users across the globe.
He scratched his adrenaline itch in 2011 when he went back
"downrange", this time directing the premier engineering and installation
team for the DoD in Afghanistan. It was his privilege to lead this talented
group of engineers who were responsible for architecting virtual
datacenter installations, IT project management, infrastructure upgrades,
and technology deployments on VMware for the entire country from 2011
to 2013.
Selected as a vExpert in 2014, he is currently supporting Operation
Enduring Freedom as a senior virtualization and storage engineer.
He loves his family, friends, and rescue mutts. He digs science,
technology, and geek gear. He's an audiophile, a horologist, an avid
collector, a woodworker, an amateur photographer, and a virtualization
nerd.
Christopher Kusek had a unique opportunity presented to him in 2013,
to take the leadership position responsible for theater-wide infrastructure
operations for the war effort in Afghanistan. Leveraging his leadership
skills and expertise in virtualization, storage, applications, and security,
he's been able to provide enterprise-quality service while operating in an