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CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO DESIGNING VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS
The Technical Facet
The technical facet is the facet that IT people most closely identify with design. It involves the
pieces and parts of technology that make up the fi nal environment: things like what servers
to use, what quantity of random access memory (RAM) the servers will have, what confi gura-
tion the storage array will use for its datastores, and what the networking confi guration will
look like. You might also see the technical facet referred to as the physical design, although it
incorporates certain logical aspects as well. These are all decisions about what will or won’t
be included in the design, and all these decisions fall into the technical facet, as illustrated in
Figure 1.5.
Figure 1.5
The technical facet
includes the “what”
decisions that are
familiar to many IT
professionals.
Technical
Decisions About What
- What brand of server?
- What CPU type in servers?
- What type of storage?
- What quantity of storage?
- What kind of networking?
- What networking configuration?
- What additional software?
Organizational
Operational
REQUIREMENTS
FUNCTIONAL
It’s important to be sure the technical facet is as complete as possible, so the design should
include — at the very least — decisions in the following technical areas:
u The number and type of servers in the environment
u The number, type, and speed of the CPUs in the servers
u The amount of RAM in the servers
u The type of connectivity to the shared storage
u The type or confi guration of the shared storage
u The number of physical NIC ports available
u The manufacturer and model of the NICs in the servers
u The exact confi guration of the virtual switches (vSwitches) and distributed vSwitches in
the environment
u The amount of power required by the equipment
u The amount of cooling required by the equipment
u The amount of rack space or fl oor space required by the equipment
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