VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook Over 70 recipes to design a virtual datacenter for performance, availability, manageability, and recoverability with VMware vSphere 5.x Hersey Cartwright BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. 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ISBN 978-1-78217-700-5 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Jeet Shah ([email protected]) Credits Author Project Coordinator Hersey Cartwright shiksha Chaturvedi Reviewers Proofreaders Takashi HosHino sandra Hopper Matthew Marlowe Elinor Perry-smith nilesh Pawar Greg swallow Indexer Rekha nair Bingfeng Zhao Graphics Acquisition Editors Valentina Dsilva sam Birch Disha Haria Kartikey Pandey Yuvraj Mannari Gregory Wild Abhinash sahu Lead Technical Editor Vaibhav Pawar Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta Technical Editors Mrunal Chavan Cover Work Arvindkumar Gupta Dennis John sebastian Rodrigues Copy Editors Tanvi Gaitonde Dipti Kapadia insiya Morbiwala Kirti Pai About the Author Hersey Cartwright has worked in the technology industry since 1996 in many roles, from helpdesk support to IT management. He began working with VMware technologies in 2006. He was the key sponsor of the virtualization initiative at ABNB Federal Credit Union and played a key role in the design, implementation, and management of virtual infrastructure of the ABNB. In his current role as the Senior Virtualization Engineer at ABS Technology Architects, he is responsible for the design and implementation of VMware environments that support a wide range of business applications. He does most of his work with small- and medium-sized environments with 3 to 10 hosts, but he has also been involved with several large, multisite deployments. He has had experience working with a wide variety of server and storage platforms. Since January 2011, he has been an instructor with the VMware IT Academy program at the Tidewater Community College, where he teaches the VMware Install, Configure, and Manage vSphere 5 and the Optimize and Scale vSphere 5 courses. He has designed and implemented the lab environment used by the students in the virtualization and security programs offered at the Chesapeake Campus of Tidewater Community College. He enjoys teaching and learns a lot by teaching others about the benefits of virtualization. Along with VMware certifications, he also holds certifications from Citrix for XenApp and XenDesktop and the Information Storage Associate (EMCISA) certification from EMC. He actively participates in the VMware community and has been awarded the vExpert title in both 2012 and 2013. He has presented multiple articles at professionalvmware.com on vBrownBags on vSphere administration, vSphere design, and vSphere disaster recovery. He regularly blogs about virtualization and other technologies at http://www.vhersey.com/. Acknowledgments I want to thank my family, especially my wife Sandy, for putting up with the long hours I work and supporting everything I do. You guys are my everything, and your support and encouragement means the world to me. I also want to thank the great VMware community. There are a lot of great folks there who are always willing to help. A special thanks to the #vCoffee crew group on Twitter: Shane, Susan, Matt, and Todd. Finally, I want to thank my employer, ABS Technology Architects, and my supervisor, Rob, for the opportunities and flexibility. About the Reviewers Takashi HosHino works at Cybozu Labs, Inc. and is interested in database and storage systems. He is developing vmbkp: an open source VMware vSphere backup tool. nilesh Pawar has a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology and has successfully completed learning .NET programming. He has a complete understanding of the life cycle of software development projects. He has spent part of his career as a programmer (.NET, MS-SQL, and Crystal Reports). He is a VMware Certified Professional, Red Hat Certified Engineer, and is Citrix Xenserver Certified, along with a strong knowledge of networks. He is well versed with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud delivery models. He designs public and private Cloud Infrastructure and Services. He has a deep understanding of network and firewall policies. He has strong impact analysis and debugging skills. He has knowledge of e-mail solutions, security (AV and anti-spam), e-mail archiving and compliances, and two-factor authentication. He has a good knowledge of Windows clustering and Hyper-V environments. He also likes to learn and excel in new technologies. His resume can be referred to for additional information on his experience. His profile can be found at www.nileshpawar.info. He can be reached anytime via his cell phone at +91-99208 29266. Greg swallow, an Indiana boy, currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Nami, and two children, Noah and Madeline. He has worked as a system administrator since 1997. His career has included running the State of Indiana website for NIC, starting up a hosted IaaS platform that runs VMware vSphere for Expedient, and managing over 2,000 Linux VMs with a team of just two persons at a large Orange company (ExactTarget), where he lives. He is currently employed at Indigo Biosystems as a DevOps engineer, which is a fancy title for a system administrator who likes to work directly with a dev team and can write scripts. When he's not working, he usually marches with his family through the woods until they beg him to stop, and then they turn around and march back to the car. Otherwise, if they don't want to go, he leaves them behind and grabs his running shoes or his bike and does the same thing on his own. I would like to thank Expedient for sending me to VCP training. The training has paid off fivefold. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for offering me the opportunity to review this book. It's been fun! Bingfeng Zhao is a system programmer. He has a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Inner Mongolia University, but he finally found that programming is much more fun and a better way to raise his standard of living. He uses C/C++ mostly and devotes more time to the virtualized digital world. He works for the EMC company as a Principal Software Engineer, and he helps to design and implement unified storage systems. He lives in Beijing, China with his lovely wife Jing Lai. www.PacktPub.com Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support files and downloads related to your book. Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at service@ packtpub.com for more details. 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Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: The Virtual Datacenter 7 introduction 7 Becoming a virtual datacenter architect 16 Using a holistic approach to datacenter design 17 Passing the VMware VCAP-DCD exam 19 Chapter 2: The Discovery Process 21 introduction 21 identifying the design factors 22 identifying stakeholders 24 Conducting stakeholder interviews 26 VMware Capacity Planner 27 Using Windows Performance Monitor 32 identifying dependencies 38 Chapter 3: The Design Factors 41 introduction 41 identifying design requirements 43 identifying design constraints 46 Making design assumptions 48 identifying design risks 50 Creating the conceptual design 52 Chapter 4: The vsphere Management Design 55 introduction 56 identifying vCenter components and dependencies 56 selecting a vCenter deployment option 58 Determining the vCenter system requirements 60 selecting a database for vCenter deployment 63