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.