Designing a Virtual Infrastructure Architecture

7/21/2019 Designing a Virtual Infrastructure Architecture

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© 2015 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

Designing a VirtualInfrastructure ArchitectureVMware vSphere 5 and VMware vSphere 6

Brian Watrous

Senior Technical Trainer

VCP, VCI, VCAP-DCA



Agenda

• Identifying requirements, constraints, and assumptions• Producing design deliverables

• Identifying major architectural components

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Goals of this Webinar

• Cover portions of vSphere Design Workshop – For more information, go to http://vmware.com/education

• Examine topics and issues covered by the VCAP5-DCD certification

– For more information, go to http://vmware.com/certification

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General Concepts invSphere Design



General Design Guidelines

• Consider single points of failure.• Develop an infrastructure that is scalable.

• Develop an infrastructure that supports maintenance activity.

• Develop standards that are simple and understandable.

• Address security.

• Consider the cost to implement and maintain the infrastructure.

• Balance the organization’s needs with technical best practices.

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Design Trade-Offs

Designing is a balancing act between:• Technical best practices

• The organization’s goals, requirements, and constraints

• Because it is a balancing act, designing might involve trade-offs.

• Every design choice has design implications that must be weighed.

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Design Decisions and Implications Example

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• Design choices haveimplications.

• For example, should thedesign use four hostswith 8-CPU cores and16GB of RAM, or twohosts with 16-CPUcores and 32GB of RAMin a single clusterenabled for VMwarevSphere® High

Availability and VMwarevSphere® DistributedResource Scheduler™

(DRS)?



Design Approach

A sound design approach includes:• Using a thorough design methodology

• Conducting interviews with the organization’s key stakeholders andsubject matter experts (SMEs)

• Discussing design alternatives with an emphasis on their effects on:

• Thoroughly documenting the design

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– Performance

– Availability

– Scalability

– Manageability

– Security

– Cost

– Compliance

– Risks



Design Sessions

This step is where design decisions are made:• Interviews, whiteboard sessions

• The design should consider both the organization’s goals,requirements, and constraints and guiding principles.

• To provide a solution that works, the key stakeholders and SMEs areinvolved early and often in the design sessions.

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Identifying Requirements,Constraints, and Assumptions



Requirements, Constraints, and Assumptions

Examples:• What are the business objectives and

requirements? Are there regulatory complianceissues?

• What is the project schedule?

• What skills and training are required?

• How do budget constraints affect the design?

• Are remote offices involved?

• What organizational policies affect the design?

• What are the security requirements?

• What political factors might affect the design?

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• Requirements – Identify and list the key business and technicalrequirements that must be achieved in the project.

– Example: The organization must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

– Example: The underlying infrastructure for any service defined as strategicmust support a minimum of four 9s of uptime (99.99 percent).

• Assumptions – Assumptions are design components that are assumedto be valid without proof.

– Example: The datacenter uses shared (core) networking hardware acrossproduction and nonproduction infrastructures.

– Example: The organization has sufficient network bandwidth between sitesto facilitate replication.

– Example: Security policies dictate server hardware separation betweenDMZ servers and internal servers.

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• Constraints – Identify and list the design constraints. – Constraints limit the design choices.

– Example: Due to a preexisting vendor relationship, host hardware hasalready been selected.

• Risks – Identify any risks that might prevent achieving the project

goals. – Example: The organization's main datacenter contains only a single core

router, which is a single point of failure.

– Example: The lack of executive sponsorship places at risk the goal ofvirtualizing 75 percent of the datacenter by the end of 2015.

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Producing DesignDeliverables



Design Deliverables

• The number and type of design documents vary by project.• The number and type of documents delivered are affected by:

– The cost of the project

– The length of the project

– The level of detail requested by the organization

– Whether the design is product-oriented or solution-oriented:

• Solution-oriented designs typically require more custom documentation.

• Product-oriented designs might include a larger proportion of references toinstructions in online documentation.

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Design Deliverables

• Capacity-analysis report: – This report might contain financial total cost of ownership and return on

investment information.

• A design document:

– The blueprint for the actual design

– Include conceptual, logical, and physical design information. – Discusses all design aspects, including:

• Physical host design

• vCenter Server design

• Cluster design

• Network design• Storage design

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• Security design

• Infrastructure monitoring

• Patch management

• Backup and restore

• Other VMware products



Design Deliverables

• A design verification document: – Includes procedures to test whether the implemented design successfully

addresses the organization’s goals, requirements, and constraints

• Includes procedures to test such design aspects as:

– Management console network redundancy

– VLAN configuration – DRS functionality

– vSphere Fault Tolerance failover

– vSphere High Availability functionality

– Storage redundancy

– Virtual machine restore after host failure

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Identifying MajorArchitectural Components



Major Architectural Components

The following are major architectural components of a VMware vSphereinfrastructure:

• Storage Infrastructure

• Network Infrastructure

• vCenter Server

• SSO Server

• Clustering Technologies

– vSphere HA

– DRS – Distributed Resource Scheduler

– EVC – Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

– DPM – Distributed Power Management

– VSAN – Virtual SAN

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vCenter Server

• Several topics must be considered:

– Platform:

• Windows-based vCenter Server system or Linux-based vCenter Server Appliance

– Machine type:

• Physical machine or virtual machine

– Hardware requirements

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vCenter Server

• VMware vCenter Server system (Windows):

– Proven technology

– Runs on supported 64-bit Windows operating systems

– Used for small to enterprise-wide environments

– Supports remote databases: SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2

• VMware vCenter ™ Server Appliance™(Linux):

– Built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

– Supports one remote database: Oracle

– Internal Postgres SQL database

–Does not support Linked Mode

– Deploys in vSphere 5.5 as hardware version 7 which supports 8 vCPUs

• Can be upgraded to hardware version 9 which supports 64 vCPUs

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VMware vCenter SSO Server

• VMware vCenter ™ Single Sign-On™ provides centralizedauthentication services to vCenter Server, as well as other VMwaretechnologies designed to integrate or coexist with vCenter Server.

• Authenticate directly with multiple Active Directory forests anddomains.

• Authenticate with OpenLDAP directory services.• Supports multiple forest, one-way, and two-way trusts.

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vSphere HA

• The need for vSphere HA is determined in the key stakeholder andSME interviews.

– Are there workloads in the infrastructure that would benefit from or requirehigher availability?

– Most environments benefit from vSphere HA.

• If vSphere HA is required, you must be careful to design sharednetworks and storage to support vSphere HA operation.

– For example, distributed virtual switches simplify the configuration of sharednetworks (but require an Enterprise Plus license).

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Scale Up or Scale Out?

• A scale-up cluster has fewer, larger hosts.

• A scale-out cluster has more, smaller hosts.

• Evaluate the capital costs of purchasing fewer, larger hosts comparedto purchasing more, smaller hosts.

– Costs vary between vendors and models.

• Evaluate the operational costs of managing a few hosts compared tomore hosts.

• Consider the purpose of the cluster. Examples:

– A virtualized server cluster typically has more hosts with fewer virtualmachines per host.

– A VMware View™ cluster typically has fewer hosts with more virtualmachines per host.

• Consider the total number of hosts and cluster limits.

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Scale-Up Clusters

• Advantages of a scale-up cluster:

– Managing fewer hosts is easier, which reduces costs.

• Disadvantages of a scale-up cluster:

– A host failure affects more virtual machines.

– A vSphere HA failover takes longer.

– Depending on the failover policy, more resources are reserved for failover,reducing the amount of resources available for day-to-day operations.

• This scenario is more serious for the Host Failures Cluster Tolerates and SpecifyFailover Hosts policies than for the adjustable Percentage of Cluster ResourcesReserved policy.

– You must be more careful to stay within the vSphere HA cluster Virtual

Machines per Host maximum.

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Scale-Out Clusters

• Advantages of a scale-out cluster:

– A host failure affects fewer virtual machines.

– A vSphere HA failover takes less time.

– Fewer resources are reserved for failover, increasing the amount ofresources available for day-to-day operations.

– You will have to be less concerned about staying within the vSphere HAcluster Virtual Machines per Host maximum.

– If DRS is enabled, more hosts offer greater migration choices and moreopportunities to achieve a better workload balance.

• Disadvantages of a scale-out cluster:

– Smaller hosts might affect the maximum size of a virtual machine. – More datacenter space is required.

– Managing more hosts is more difficult, which increases costs.

– Power and cooling costs are usually higher.

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Admission Control

Always configure strict admission control to protect the workload.

– This reserves resources that cannot be used under normal circumstancesand increases hardware costs but protects critical business services.

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Admission Control Policy

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vSphere HA Heartbeat Redundancy

• Always configure heartbeat redundancy or explain the risks to the keystakeholders and SMEs.

– The risk is that failure for hosts to receive heartbeats might trigger aclusterwide isolation response.

• Ways to create heartbeat redundancy:

– Use reliable storage for your heartbeat datastores. – Create management network redundancy.

• Use NIC teaming on a single management network.

• Use a second management network.

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Heartbeat Datastores

• vCenter Server selects a preferred set of heartbeat datastores.

• vCenter Server uses certain guidelines for choosing the preferred setof heartbeat datastores:

– Choose a datastore that is accessible by the maximum number of hosts.

– Prefer VMware vSphere® VMFS datastores over NFS datastores.

– Prefer datastores that are backed by different storage arrays.

• vSphere HA uses about 3MB of disk space on each heartbeatdatastore.

• The vSphere HA use of the datastores adds negligible overhead andhas no performance effect on other datastore operations.

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Network Redundancy: NIC Teaming

• You can also create a networkinterface card (NIC) team forvSphere HA management networkredundancy.

• Each NIC in the team should beconnected to a separate physical

switch. – A NIC team helps prevent a switch

failure from initiating a vSphere HAisolation response.

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Network Redundancy: Second ManagementNetwork

• Create a second VMkernel port forESXi, which is attached to aseparate virtual switch or port group.

– All management network interfacesare used to send heartbeats.

• Configure the virtual switches onseparate physical switches:

– Eliminates a single point of failure

• Use the das.isolationaddressparameter to add an isolationaddress to each additional

management network:

– Eliminates the isolation address as asingle point of failure

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Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

In general, DRS should always be enabled – The automated workload balancing performed by

DRS always benefits overall infrastructureperformance, scalability, and manageability.

– An exception to this is if the organization are runningapplications that scale and balance at theapplication level.

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DRS Cluster Design

• vMotion migration requirements must be met by allhosts in the DRS cluster.

• Enable Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC).

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DRS Cluster Design

• Configure DRS for full automation, using the defaultmigration threshold:

– Reduces daily monitoring and managementrequirements

– Provides sufficient balance without excessivemigration activity

• DRS load balancing benefits from having a largernumber of hosts in the cluster (scale-out cluster)

rather than a smaller number of hosts.

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DRS Cluster Design

• DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules should be theexception rather than the norm.

– Configuring many affinity and anti-affinity rules limitsmigration choices and could collectively have a negativeeffect on workload balance.

• An affinity rule is beneficial in the followingsituations:

– Virtual machines on the same network share significant

network traffic. – Applications can share a large memory working set size.

• Use anti-affinity rules to increase availability forservice workloads as appropriate.

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Deploying Multiple Clusters

Many reasons to deploy multiple clusters exist:• A single cluster might exceed a vSphere limit:

– Virtual machines per host limit (in a vSphere HA cluster)

– Hosts per cluster limit

– Hosts per LUN limit

• Both server and user desktop virtual machines arebeing deployed.

– Each type of virtualization follows different cluster designprinciples. A user desktop solution typically has fewerhosts but more virtual machines per host.

– Place the virtualized servers in one cluster and the userdesktops in another.

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Additional Clustering Technologies

DPM – Distributed Power ManagementVSAN – Virtual SAN

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Recommended Next Steps

• Sneak Peek:

• On Demand Classroom for vSphere: Optimize and Scale

• Classroom Course:• VMware vSphere: Design Workshop

• Talk to a Learning Specialist if you have questions!

– 1-877-735-1355

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http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=63079

https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=59321

https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=59321





Next FREE Webinar – Save the Date!

• “Troubleshooting Strategies for vSphere 6” The webinar will discuss best practices and troubleshooting strategies forthe vSphere 6 environment.

• Date: April 15, 2015

Instructor: Jamie Rawson

Registration details will be in your follow-up email

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Designing a Virtual Infrastructure Architecture

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