Table Of ContentvSphere Design Best Practices
Apply industry-accepted best practices to design
reliable high-performance datacenters for your
business needs
Brian Bolander
Christopher Kusek
professional expertise distilled
P U B L I S H I N G
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
vSphere Design Best Practices
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First published: May 2014
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Cover Image by Abhishek Dhir ([email protected])
Credits
Authors Project Coordinator
Brian Bolander Melita Lobo
Christopher Kusek
Proofreader
Simran Bhogal
Reviewers
Andy Grant
Muhammad Zeeshan Munir Indexers
Mariammal Chettiyar
Prasenjit Sarkar
Tejal Soni
Commissioning Editor
Rebecca Youe Graphics
Valentina Dsilva
Abhinash Sahu
Acquisition Editor
Meeta Rajani
Production Coordinator
Alwin Roy
Content Development Editor
Sharvari Tawde
Cover Work
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Technical Editors
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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 environment that includes the real
and regular challenges of heat, dust, rockets, and earthquakes.
He has over 20 years' experience in the industry, with virtualization experience
running back to the pre-1.0 days of VMware. He has shared his expertise with
many far and wide through conferences, presentations, #CXIParty, and sponsoring
or presenting at community events and outings whether it is focused on storage,
VMworld, or cloud.
He is the author of VMware vSphere 5 Administration Instant Reference, Sybex, 2012,
and VMware vSphere Performance: Designing CPU, Memory, Storage, and Networking for
Performance-Intensive Workloads, Sybex, 2014. He is a frequent contributor to VMware
Communities' Podcasts and vBrownbag, and has been an active blogger for over
a decade.
A proud VMware vExpert and huge supporter of the program and growth of the
virtualization community, Christopher continues to find new ways to outreach
and spread the joys of virtualization and the transformative properties it has on
individuals and businesses alike. He was named an EMC Elect in 2013, 2014, and
continues to contribute to the storage community, whether directly or indirectly,
with analysis and regular review.
He continues to update his blog with useful stories of virtualization and storage and
his adventures throughout the world, which currently include stories of his times in
Afghanistan. You can read his blog at http://pkguild.com or more likely catch him
on Twitter; his twitter handle is @cxi.
When he is not busy changing the world, one virtual machine at a time or Facetiming
with his family on the other side of the world, he's trying to find awesome vegan
food in the world at large or somewhat edible food for a vegan in a war zone.
About the Reviewers
Andy Grant works as a technical consultant for HP Enterprise Services. Andy's
primary focus is datacenter infrastructure and virtualization projects across a
number of industries including government, healthcare, forestry, financial, gas
and oil, and international contracting. He currently holds a number of technical
certifications including VCAP4/5-DCA/DCD, VCP4/5, MCITP:EA, MCSE, CCNA,
Security+, A+, and HP ASE BladeSystem.
Outside of work, he enjoys backcountry camping, playing action pistol sports (IPSC),
and spending time being a goof with his son.
Muhammad Zeeshan Munir is a freelance ICT consultant and solution architect.
He established his career as a system administrator in 2004 and since then has
acquired and executed many successful projects in multimillion ICT industries.
With more than 10 years of experience, he now provides ICT consultancy services
to different clients in Europe. He also works as a system consultant for Qatar
Computing Research Institute. He regularly contributes to different wikis and
produces various video tutorials mostly about different technologies, including
VMware products, Zimbra e-mail services, OpenStack, and Red Hat Linux, which
can be found at http://zee.linxsol.com/system-administration. When he is
doing nothing, he likes to travel around and speak languages such as English, Urdu,
Punjabi, and Italian.
Prasenjit Sarkar is a senior member of the technical staff in VMware Service
Provider Cloud R&D where he provides architectural oversight and technical
guidance to design, implement, and test VMware's Cloud datacenters. You can
follow him on Twitter at @stretchcloud.
He is an author, R&D guy, and a blogger focusing on virtualization, cloud
computing, storage, networking, and other enterprise technologies. He has more
than 10 years' expert knowledge in R&D, professional services, alliances, solution
engineering, consulting, and technical sales with expertise in architecting and
deploying virtualization solutions and rolling out new technology and solution
initiatives. His primary focus is on the VMware vSphere infrastructure and public
cloud using VMware vCloud Suite. One of his other areas of focus is to own the
entire life cycle of a VMware-based IaaS (SDDC), especially vSphere, vCloud
Director, vShield Manager, and vCenter Operations.
He was one of the VMware vExperts in 2012 and 2013 and well known for his
acclaimed virtualization blog http://stretch-cloud.info. He holds certifications
from VMware, Cisco, Citrix, Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Exin. Prior to joining
VMware, he has served other fine organizations such as Capgemini, HP, and GE as a
solution architect and infrastructure architect.
I would like to thank and dedicate this book to my family.
Without their endless and untiring support, this book would
not have been possible.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Virtual Data Center Design 5
Virtual Data Center design principles 6
Best practices 7
Designing Virtual Data Center 8
VMware vCenter components 10
Choosing a platform for your vCenter server 11
Using the vCenter server appliance 12
Sizing your vCenter server 13
Choosing your vCenter database 14
vSphere clustering – HA and DRS 16
Host considerations 16
Network considerations 17
Storage considerations 19
Cluster considerations 19
Admission control 20
Summary 21
Chapter 2: Hypervisor Design 23
ESXi hardware design 23
CPU considerations 24
Memory and NUMA considerations 26
Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) considerations 28
Considerations for Java virtual machines (JVMs) 28
Network interface card considerations 29
Hypervisor storage components 31
Stateless host design 31
Scale-Up and Scale-Out designs 33
Summary 35
