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

1.2 – 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.

I/O Analyzer

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/io-analyzer

I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance solution by VMware that provides a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments. I/O Analyzer automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle and reduces the performance diagnosis time from days to hours.

Features

• Integrated framework for storage performance testing
• Readily deployable virtual appliance
• Easily configure and launch I/O tests on multiple hosts
• View integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
• Easily export performance data for off-site analysis

CPU Ready Time

vCPU waits for pCPU

Live port migration

Live port migration means a stand alone dvport can be moved to a dvportgroup and thus acquiring the all the configuration of the dvportgroup and a dvport which is a part of a dvportgroup can be moved out from a dvportgroup, the subsequent config changes to the dvportgroup does not apply to this dvport.

echo -n 'y\ny' | ./shell.sh

This echo will answer two y separated by new line, which is asked by shell.sh. This is even nice than expect

Nice trick from http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/03/unattended-upgrade-of-hp-management-agents/