The Discovery Process

This chapter will introduce you to design factors and focus on the discovery phase of the design process. The following diagram displays the phases of the design process:

Phases of the design process

Discovery is the most important phase of the design process. It is also the most time-consuming. The discovery process includes a meeting with the stakeholders to determine business requirements that the design must meet. It also includes current state assessments to determine the technical requirements that the design must satisfy in order to meet customer requirements, which in turn become the design requirements.

During the discovery process, an architect must interact with many different individuals in an organization to collect the necessary information that is needed to begin creating the conceptual design. Decision makers, strategic planners, facilities...

Identifying the design factors

The design factors are the primary considerations that influence the design. These factors define the function that the design must accomplish, how it should accomplish it, and what may prevent the design from accomplishing it.

How to do it...

The design factors encompass much more than just the physical resources, such as the CPU, memory, and storage, necessary to run workloads in a virtual environment.

Identifying the design factors needs the following requirements:

• Functional and nonfunctional requirements
• Constraints
• Assumptions
• Risks

How it works...

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Identifying stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in or benefits from the design. A virtual data center design will have at least some impact on many, if not all, areas of an organization and not just those associated with technology.

How to do it...

Identify the key stakeholders, including the following:

• Project sponsors
• Application owners and providers
• System, network, and storage administrators
• Application users

How it works...

Understanding the role of the stakeholders helps an architect to identify who can provide the information necessary to...

Conducting stakeholder interviews

During the discovery process, the primary source of information will be stakeholder interviews. These interviews can be face-to-face meetings or can be done over the phone (or the web). Interviews are not only helpful in collecting information about the business needs and technical requirements, but also keep the stakeholders engaged in the project.

How to do it...

The following are examples of the questions that should be asked in order to determine the business requirements that will influence the design:

• What are the business initiatives, challenges, and goals?
• Are there Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in place? What are they?
• What are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point...

Using VMware Capacity Planner

VMware's Capacity Planner is an inventory and planning tool available to VMware partner organizations, which collects resource utilization information from systems, analyzes the data against industry-standard reference data, and provides the information needed to successfully consolidate the servers into a virtualized environment.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to complete a Capacity Planner engagement:

1. Determine the amount of time for which the Capacity Planner engagement should run based on the business cycle
2. Choose the type of Capacity Planner assessment to be run: a Consolidation Estimate (CE) or a Capacity Assessment (CA)
3. Deploy the Capacity Planner collector in the environment...

Using Windows Performance Monitor

The Microsoft Windows perfmon can be used to collect performance information, such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk I/O utilization of the Windows servers.

How to do it...

In this example, Microsoft Windows perfmon is used to collect disk I/O metrics, with the following steps:

1. Open Performance Monitor and use the Data Collector Set wizard to create a user-defined data collector, as displayed in the following screenshot:

Creating a user-defined data collector in Performance Monitor

2. Once the Data Collector Set application has been created, add New | Data Collector to the Data Collector Set, as shown in the following screenshot:

Adding a new Data Collector in Performance...

Conducting a VMware optimization assessment

The VMware Optimization Assessment (VOA) is an enhanced evaluation of vRealize Operations Manager, which includes reports providing information about the configuration, capacity, and performance of a vSphere environment. This information is useful for an administrator or architect validating an existing vSphere deployment or planning an expansion to an existing vSphere deployment.

The VOA will provide useful insights into a virtual environment by providing detail analytics, including the following:

• Providing information on misconfigured clusters, hosts, and virtual machines
• Identifying potential performance problems with root cause analysis
• Analyzing virtual machine resources to identify undersized and/or oversized virtual machines, providing opportunities to attain a right-size environment

The information gathered during a VOA will...

Identifying dependencies

A dependency is a relationship among systems or services. During the discovery process, dependencies should be identified and documented. In Chapter 1, The Virtual Data Center, we discussed the importance of taking an holistic view when designing a virtualized environment. Identifying dependencies is the key to the holistic approach of designing.

How to do it...

An architect must identify dependencies in order to understand what effect a design decision or change may have on other services. The architect should identify the following dependencies:

• Physical infrastructure dependencies
• Application and service dependencies

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