2.6 - Define Management Design

vSphere Development Tools

• vSphere Web Service SDK: language neutral
• CIM APIs: SMASH/Server Management API-DMTF, Storage Management API SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification)
• vSphere SDK for Perl is bundled with vSphere CLI
• vSphere PowerCLI plus vSphere SDK for .NET
• VIX API, a libray for writing scripts and programs to manipulate VMs

2.4 Define Logical Network Design

2.2 – Map Service Dependencies

Virtualizing a Windows Active Directory Domain Infrastructure

• Hardware Consolidation and Standardization
• Test and Development
• Security Control
• take advantage of the many features of VMware Infrastructure, such as disaster recovery and planning, high availability, and optimized resource utilization.

Best Practices for Virtualizing Active Directory With any Windows OS, there are several steps to ensure that
your virtualized Active Directory implementation is a success.These steps include:
1. Controlling clock drift
2. Optimizing network performance
3. Making DNS modifications correctly
4. Replicating database information
5. Providing virtual machine access control
6. Ensuring disaster preparedness and high availability
7. Handling disaster recovery

There are several excellent reasons for virtualizing Windows Active Directory. Virtualization offers the advantages of hardware consolidation, total cost of ownership reduction, physical machine life cycle management, mobility and affordable disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. It also provides a
convenient environment for test and development, as well as isolation and security.

2.3 – Define Logical Storage Design

What’s New in VMware® vSphere™ 4.1 — Storage
Storage I/O Control: It extends the familiar constructs of shares and limits, which have existed for CPU and memory, to address storage utilization through a dynamic allocation of I/O queue slots across a cluster of ESX servers.

SIOC provides a dynamic allocation mechanism that adjusts to changing conditions of a mixed workload. It leverages the I/O shares, which are set on the Virtual Machine Properties for each virtual disk, to distribute available I/O slots to ensure a quality of service is enforced not just at the host level, but across the collection of hosts that are sharing that datastore.

SIOC works only with block-based datastores and datastores that reside on a single extent and are managed by one vCenter management server

vStorage API for Array Integration
This API is currently supported by several storage partners and requires these partners to release a special version of their firmware to work with this API. In the vSphere 4.1 release, this array offload capability supports three primitives:
1. Full copy enables the storage arrays to make full copies of data within the array without having the ESX server read and write the data.
2. Block zeroing enables storage arrays to zero out a large number of blocks to speed up provisioning of virtual machines.
3. Hardware-assisted locking provides an alternative means to protect the metadata for VMFS cluster-file systems, thereby improving the scalability of large ESX server farms sharing a datastore.

Enabling vStorage API for Array Integration
By default these three primitives described above are not enabled upon install and must be enabled in the advanced settings for the ESX server, and they must have the correct array firmware loaded for this feature to work. Enabling or disabling these primitives is done through the advanced settings on the ESX servers.
Three settings under advanced settings:
DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove - full copy
DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit - block zeroing
VMFS3.HarwareAccelerated Locking - hardware-assisted locking

Support for 8Gb FC Host-Based Adaptors (HBAs)

Broadcom iSCSI offload functionality enables on-chip processing of the iSCSI protocol (as well as TCP and IP protocols), which frees up host CPU resources at 10GbE line rates over a single Ethernet port. This functionality provides extended performance benefits that meet the demands of bandwidth-intensive applications requiring high-performance block storage I/O for VMware ESX, servicing all instances of the virtual machine.

2.1 Map Business Requirements to the Logical Design

VMware vSphere Evaluation Worksheet

Hardware Checklist:
All hardware has been validated against the VMware
Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)

Software Checklist:
VMware vSphere VMware ESX
VMware vCenter Server
VMware vSphere Client
After you have successfully installed the VMware vSphere software components on your hardware, you can
proceed to perform the evaluation of VMware vSphere. For each scenario, you can use the corresponding
checklist below to ensure that you are following the proper sequence.

Section 1
Network Configuration
Storage Configuration
Cluster Setup
High Availability
vMotion

Section 2
FC Storage Setup
Host Profiles
Distributed Resource Scheduling
Distributed Power Management
Fault Tolerance
Storage vMotion and Thin Provisioning
vApp
Update Manager

Section 3
Linked Mode
vNetwork Distributed Switch
Private VLAN
Hot Add
Dynamic Storage Management
Custom Alarm Setup
Management Assistant
PowerCLI

1.3 – Determine Risks, Constraints, and Assumptions

Developing the Strategy

 IDENTIFY AND INVOLVE KEY STAKEHOLDERS
The key stakeholders should include (but not be limited to):
• Project sponsor (CIO, VP Infrastructure, IT Director)
• Key application owners
• Server architecture lead
• LAN/WAN architecture leads
• Data center manager

ESTABLISHING THE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
• Containment of server costs
• Containment of existing servers
• Reducing costs to manage
• Achieving rapid recovery
• Enabling high availability
• Providing instant server provisioning
• Managing growth

IDENTIFYING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• ROI will be realized within 1 year
• TCO will be reduced by n%.
• Minimum of n% reduction in the time to deploy new servers.
• Reduced server recoverability time by n%.

IDENTIFYING POTENTIAL CONSTRAINTS AND RISKS
 Typical constraints might include:
• Minimal capital budget to absorb one-time costs
• Limited staff capacity for new initiatives
• Staff uncertainty about a new technology.
Typical risks could include:
• Lack of subject matter expertise on staff
• Potential impact on production servers during a re-provisioning cycle
• Too many services on a single hardware platform
• Lack of thorough understanding of the environment.


CAPTURING THE ASSUMPTIONS
Typical assumptions might include:
• All production servers are candidates for the service.
• This service is preferred over stand-alone servers.
• Consensus among the team will be achieved prior to management
recommendation.
• Production guests and non-prod guests will all reside on the same hosts
(or vice versa)
DEVELOPING AND WEIGHING SELECTION CRITERIA
The following criteria may be considered:
• Availability
• Reliability
• Manageability
• Recoverability
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• One-time cost
• Performance
• Time to deploy
• Ease of use.

REVIEWING THE CURRENT STATE
the most common aspects of your
current IT infrastructure to review are:
• WAN design
• LAN design
• SAN configuration
• Intel server architectures
• Server configuration management
• Server provisioning process
• High-level disaster recovery plan overview
• Server profile matrix
• Server license agreements.

DEVELOPING A SERVER PROFILE MATRIX
The matrix includes critical server metrics, including:
• Number and speed of processors
• Average utilization, including a variability factor where a 1 signifies consistent
utilization, and a 5 signifies extremely variable utilization.
• Physical memory in use
• Network I/O (Lo, Med, Hi)
• Disk I/O (Lo, Med, Hi)

VM STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN
the technical aspects of the virtualization strategy can be
developed, including:
• Identification of virtualization candidates
• Development of the design using best practices
• Server farm design:
o Storage connectivity
o Cluster connectivity
o Network connectivity
o Switching
• Development of OS “templates,” sometimes known as “Golden Masters”
• Recoverability methods
• Management processes
• Provisioning processes

GUEST SELECTION/VM MODEL
This decision should be based on two factors:
• The physical resource requirements for the server
• The number of users or amount of activity the server will support

Developing the Deployment Plan
IDENTIFYING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Zero impact on production operation
• Availability of appropriate skilled technical resources
• Development of key processes and procedures prior to production
• Bulletproof rollback plan
• Organizational deployment methods, policies, and procedures will be followed
P2V tools will be used where possible to compress time and resource requirements.

IDENTIFYING AND MAPPING PROJECT TASKS
IDENTIFYING DEPENDENCIES
IDENTIFYING NECESSARY DEPLOYMENT ROLES

Because the potential benefits are so significant, having a diligent, big-picture view at the outset is essential to fully realizing the benefits of your ESX environment.

Accelerate is a big-picture, road-tested process for designing and deploying network
and systems infrastructure, including the latest server virtualization technologies.

Accelerate is a rapid, staged process that starts with facilitated design and planning
sessions and centers on our unique deployment management teams.

1.2 – Gather and analyze application requirements

1. Microsoft Exchange

• Using Virtual Machine Building Blocks to Meet Varying SLAs
• Backup to disk, archieve to tape at remote site
• Stand-alone server with nightly backup to tape
• Smaller virtual machines (CPU and RAM) can be moved faster with VMware VMotion than larger virtual machines.
• Size CPU and RAM resources conservatively, and only adjust as required.
• When deciding on the number and size of virtual machine building blocks, consider how this will impact licensing costs for the operating system and applications.
• To accurately determine your mailbox profile requirements, utilize the Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer.
• Mailbox Server; Client Access Server; Hub Transport Server 
• Best Practice: Latest VM hardware version, and install VMware Tools; VMDK disks along the sector boundary recommended by storage vendor.; enough memory to avoid ESX host swappping; also follow Microsoft CPU/Memory best practice guidelines for  Exchange on physical environment.
• Conclusion: ESX vSphere has excellent performance and scalability; low latency and consume less CPU

2. Microsoft SQL

• After you clearly understand your organization's needs - business and technical requirements, availability and other operational requirements for implementing SQL Server, the next step is to estabish a baseline, using data from the current running physical deployment. using VMware Capacity Planner, this execise collects all essential performance metrics
• Recent hardware, proper Storage configuration, size ESX host with adequate capacity; follow SQL server best practice.
• scale-out approach: multiple small SQL server for more granularity.
• scale-up approach: a large VM with multiple database per SQL instance, might lead to bottleneck or DRS difficulty.
• SQL Server running in a 2 vCPU virtual machine performed at 92 percent of a physical system booted with 2 CPUs.
• An 8 vCPU virtual machine achieved 86 percent of physical machine performance.
  The statistics
• performance is not a barrier for configuring large multi-CPU SQL Server instances in virtual machines or
  consolidating multiple virtual machines on a single host to achieve impressive aggregate throughput. The small difference observed
  in performance between the equivalent deployments on physical and virtual machines—without employing sophisticated tuning
  at the vSphere layer—indicate that the benefits of virtualization are easily available to most SQL Server installations.These improvements can result in better performance, higher consolidation ratios, and lower total cost for each workload.

3. Oracle Database

• Typical Oracle database applications generate much less I/O and support far fewer transactions per second than vSphere 4.0 supports.
• Even the most demanding Oracle® database workloads can now be virtualized with VMware vSphere™ and ESX® 4—with greater than 95 percent of Oracle instances matching native performance
• Proper BIOS settings for virtualization; Disable not unnecessary hard ware settings
• In addition to disabling these components in the BIOS, make sure they are also not part of the operating system installation process.
• After the operating system has been successfully installed, the next step is to disable unnecessary foreground and background processes.
• Optimized Operating Systems: For Linux, compile a monolithic kernel, which will only load the necessary features. Whether you intend on running Windows or Linux as the final optimized operating system, these host installs should be cloned by the VMware administrator for reuse
• Use as Few Virtual CPUs (vCPUs) as Possible.
• Enable HyperThreading for Intel Core i7 Processors.
• Set Memory Reservations Equal to the Size of the Oracle SGA.
• Use Large Memory Pages.
• For IPBased Storage iSCSI and NFS, Enable Jumbo Frames.
• Create Dedicated Datastores to Service Database Workloads.
• Use vSphere VMFS for SingleInstance Oracle Database Deployments.Oracle support on VMware is addressed in its entirety later in this document.
• Make Sure VMFS is Properly Aligned. To manually align your VMware VMFS partitions, first check your storage vendor’s recommendations for the partition starting block (Default 64KB boundary)
• Use Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle ASM is not a substitute for close communication between the storage administrator and the database administrator.
• Use Your Storage Vendors Best Practices Documentation when Laying Out the Oracle Database.
• Optimized Architectures are Not Designed in Silos.

1.1 Five Steps to determine when to virutalize your servers

1. Understand the benefits of going virtual

• Save time to deploy server
• Save money in less administration, hardware requirement, energy consumption
• Simplify management - resource optimization, HA, and snapshot
• Recovery from disaster faster

     2.  Evaluate a virtualization solution

• a solution has been around for a long period of time and has been tested with a variety of applications
• a solution has been proven in production IT environments
• a solution offers flexibility and options to fit the company need.

     3. Determine if all applications are going to work well with virtualization

• number of applications won't fit for virtualization is small
• Look into Virtual Appliance for performance concern

     4. Analyze the cost of virtualizing your server infrastructure

• you calculate your ROI to virtualize your servers, with the VMware ROI calculator
• typical payback period, or amount of time to break even on the investment
•  One point to note about comparing costs among virtualization vendors: VMware has
  introduced a method for comparing “cost per application

•  Virtualization requires:
  • Fewer servers
  • Fewer infrastructure costs – cooling, UPS, generator
  • Less spent on electricity
  • Less space needed for you IT infrastructure
  • Less time spent administering servers
  • Faster response to business needs

      5.  Analyze the time and skill needed to virtualize your server infrastructure

• Depending on the scope of the project, it could be very quick or it could be a more
  significant undertaking.