Datasheet

THE PROCESS OF DESIGN
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13
It’s here, while assembling the design, that you’ll defi ne standards and best practices for the
VMware vSphere environment:
Standards A good design defi nes standards for host names, networking confi guration,
storage layouts, resource allocation, virtual machine confi gurations, and so on. Standards
are important because standardization reduces complexity. When complexity is reduced,
operations are simplifi ed, and costs are generally reduced. Without standards, environ-
ments become too complex to operate effi ciently — and ineffi ciency is the bane of a VMware
vSphere environment.
Best Practices A good design both defi nes and enforces best practices where those best
practices align with the organization’s needs and functional requirements. The term best
practices doesn’t just mean the recommendations made by vendors for confi guring their
products; it also means the operational processes that the organization should follow. For
example, a best practice states that all Windows-based VMs should have their fi le systems
properly aligned in the virtual disk. Yes, that’s a recommendation made by VMware, but
it’s also an operational recommendation made by a good design to ensure the effi cient and
stable operation of the environment. A good design includes other best practices that are
specifi c to this particular implementation, such as the structure of new VMs, or the confi gu-
ration for new datastores.
Don’t Accept Best Practices Blindly
When it comes to vendor best practices, don’t accept them blindly. Examine those best practices
and try to understand the reasons behind them. If the storage vendor says it’s a best practice to use
a particular multipathing policy, take a deeper look to understand why that multipathing policy is
recommended. If a server vendor provides certain BIOS settings as best practices, try to fi gure out
why those settings are defi ned as best practices. Doing so will give you a deeper, more complete
understanding of the environment and make you better prepared to provide implementation-
specifi c best practices.
Assembling the design is a time-consuming and detailed process. Most, if not all, of the
remaining chapters in this book focus on specifi c technical areas and the decisions you must
make when building your VMware vSphere design.
Documenting the Design
When the design has been assembled — that is, after you’ve made all the decisions that need to
be made in each facet of the design, and you’ve compared the results of those decisions (and all
the downstream decisions) against the functional requirements to ensure that the requirements
are still being met — then you’re ready to document the design.
This portion of the design process might happen concurrently with the assembly of the
design and is, for the most part, straightforward. You should ensure that your documentation
addresses each of the three facets of the design. In many instances, IT professionals tend to
forget about the organizational and operational facets, but these are just as important as the
technical facet and deserve equal treatment in your fi nal design documentation.
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