TBL Networks, The Blinky Light

This is the Live Blog of INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers / Moderator:

• Chris Colotti- VCDX # 37 VMware, Inc. – Moderator
• Aidan Dalgleish – VCDX # 10 VMware, Inc.
• Duncan Epping – VCDX #007 VMware, Inc.
• Rawlinson Rivera VCDX #86, VMware, Inc.

This will be a panel discussion. The session begins with “Gathering Requirements”

Talk to Customers

• Gather information and document
• Categorize (Requirements, Nice to Have, Constraints, Assumptions
• Conceptualize

Great advice for consultants and anyone going for the VCDX certification.

Some Example Requirements

• Increase agility / flexibility while reducing costs
• 99.9% Availability

Some Example Constraints

• Hardware already acquired
• Number of NICs dictated per server
• Reuse existing equipment

Some Example Assumption

• Sufficient switch ports
• Storage can handle expected workload
• Properly trained staff

Historical best practices

• Understand why it is a best practice
• It is better to put requirements first and apply the best practices to that requirement
• Constantly evaluate best practices and question whether it still applies to newer software

Some Use Case Examples (The application comes first!)

• Server consolidation
• OPEX savings
• Resource optimization
• Standardization
• IaaS

Conceptualize Your Design

• Building Blocks – Operations, Time to Market, Compliance

Sizing / Scaling

• What does the environment look like today?
• How will size / scaling impact your Design / Project?
• What is the use Case?

Again, all of these details should revolve around the application use case.

Tools

• Capacity Planner
• PlateSpin
• Lanamark

With capacity planning, we are trying to identify the anomalies within the physical infrastructure. These anomalies may require some extra planning.

Compute Considerations

• 2 vs 4 sockets
• Optimal Memory Configurations
• TPS vs no TPS
• What is the sweetspot? – Still seems to be dual socket – 96GB of memory

Network Sizing

• Networking is rarely a bottleneck (especially with 10GbE)
• 10GbE will lift all (or most) constrains for a long time
• Again, use the capacity planning report to identify anomalies.

Storage Sizing

• It’s not just the capacity, but the performance that matters
• Take into account RAID penalties
• Size includes the VM and its associated files

Storage Considerations

• The RAID level used impacts IOPS
• RTO impacts the number of VMs per datastore. Can you restore within the RTO window?

Hosts

• What is the vendor?
• AMD vs Intel
• Blade vs Rack
• Embedded ESXi, Boot from SAN, Auto-Deploy, etc?
• Management integration?

Boot Considerations

• Local
• Local SD / USB
• SAN Boot
• PXE Boot with Auto-Deploy
• USB is cheap
• Local disk has higher availability
• SAN Boot, Stateless computing but more costly
• PXE Boot is the best of all worlds

vCenter Design

• How many VMs?
• vCenter Appliance?
• Web Client? – Use vCenter Appliance
• SRM / View / vCloud Director? – Consider vCenter Heartbeat
• Statistics level will impact performance / scaling
• Read, read, read the documentation!
• Scale up or scale out?
• Should we put VUM on the same server?
• How many vCenter users?

Clustering

• How many physical Datacenters?
• Will each physical DC need a vCenter Server?
• How many Datacenters will each vCenter manage?
• Separate clusters for DMZ?
• Separate clusters for test?
• Remember the Datacenter is the boundary for vMotion, not the cluster
• EVC is required for FT, consider enabling it by default

Networking Design

• What type of switch will be used?
• What are the pSwitch capabilities?
• Will VLANs be used?
• Will PVLANs be required? – Consider vShield App
• Network I/O Control is awesome! Use it!

vShield App

• VNIC level firewall
• DVFilter used for in- and out-bound traffic
• VShield App Firewall per host
• Set rules on vCenter Objects like Resource Pools and Portgroups
• vShield Manager cannot be locked out, Exclude vCenter as well

vShield Edge

• 5 tuple firewall
• NAT
• DHCP
• VPN
• Load Balancing
• Network Isolation
• Data Security Options
• High Availability option is now available
• Consider a management cluster as more appliances are deployed

Back up all management databases!

Storage Design

• Protocol choice? – Fibre Channel higher performing, NFS is much easier to implement
• Does the array support VAAI?
• Does the array support VASA?
• Can we use Storage DRS? – Auto-Tiering can impact the decision

This wraps up the session. There was a lot of great information for practitioners and those who are pursuing the VCDX certification. This has been one of my favorite sessions at VMworld.