vsphere Design Best Practices

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2 vsphere Design Best Practices Apply industry-accepted best practices to design reliable high-performance datacenters for your business needs Brian Bolander Christopher Kusek PUBLISHING professional expertise distilled BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

3 vsphere Design Best Practices 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 authors, 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. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: May 2014 Production Reference: Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN Cover Image by Abhishek Dhir (abhishekdhirimages@gmail.com)

4 Credits Authors Brian Bolander Christopher Kusek Reviewers Andy Grant Muhammad Zeeshan Munir Prasenjit Sarkar Commissioning Editor Rebecca Youe Acquisition Editor Meeta Rajani Content Development Editor Sharvari Tawde Technical Editors Rosmy George Manal Pednekar Project Coordinator Melita Lobo Proofreader Simran Bhogal Indexers Mariammal Chettiyar Tejal Soni Graphics Valentina Dsilva Abhinash Sahu Production Coordinator Alwin Roy Cover Work Alwin Roy Copy Editor Laxmi Subramanian

5 About the Authors Brian Bolander spent 13 years on active duty in the United States Air Force. A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, he was honorably discharged in He immediately returned to Afghanistan and worked on datacenter operations for the US Department of Defense (DoD) at various locations in southwest Asia. Invited to join a select team of internal consultants and troubleshooters responsible for operations in five countries, he was also the project manager for what was then the largest datacenter built in Afghanistan. After leaving Afghanistan in 2011, he managed IT operations in a DoD datacenter in the San Francisco Bay Area. His team was responsible for dozens of multimillion dollar programs running on VMware and supporting users across the globe. He scratched his adrenaline itch in 2011 when he went back "downrange", this time directing the premier engineering and installation team for the DoD in Afghanistan. It was his privilege to lead this talented group of engineers who were responsible for architecting virtual datacenter installations, IT project management, infrastructure upgrades, and technology deployments on VMware for the entire country from 2011 to Selected as a vexpert in 2014, he is currently supporting Operation Enduring Freedom as a senior virtualization and storage engineer. He loves his family, friends, and rescue mutts. He digs science, technology, and geek gear. He's an audiophile, a horologist, an avid collector, a woodworker, an amateur photographer, and a virtualization nerd.

6 Christopher Kusek had a unique opportunity presented to him in 2013, to take the leadership position responsible for theater-wide infrastructure operations for the war effort in Afghanistan. Leveraging his leadership skills and expertise in virtualization, storage, applications, and security, he's been able to provide enterprise-quality service while operating in an environment that includes the real and regular challenges of heat, dust, rockets, and earthquakes. He has over 20 years' experience in the industry, with virtualization experience running back to the pre-1.0 days of VMware. He has shared his expertise with many far and wide through conferences, presentations, #CXIParty, and sponsoring or presenting at community events and outings whether it is focused on storage, VMworld, or cloud. He is the author of VMware vsphere 5 Administration Instant Reference, Sybex, 2012, and VMware vsphere Performance: Designing CPU, Memory, Storage, and Networking for Performance-Intensive Workloads, Sybex, He is a frequent contributor to VMware Communities' Podcasts and vbrownbag, and has been an active blogger for over a decade. A proud VMware vexpert and huge supporter of the program and growth of the virtualization community, Christopher continues to find new ways to outreach and spread the joys of virtualization and the transformative properties it has on individuals and businesses alike. He was named an EMC Elect in 2013, 2014, and continues to contribute to the storage community, whether directly or indirectly, with analysis and regular review. He continues to update his blog with useful stories of virtualization and storage and his adventures throughout the world, which currently include stories of his times in Afghanistan. You can read his blog at or more likely catch him on Twitter; his twitter handle When he is not busy changing the world, one virtual machine at a time or Facetiming with his family on the other side of the world, he's trying to find awesome vegan food in the world at large or somewhat edible food for a vegan in a war zone.

7 About the Reviewers Andy Grant works as a technical consultant for HP Enterprise Services. Andy's primary focus is datacenter infrastructure and virtualization projects across a number of industries including government, healthcare, forestry, financial, gas and oil, and international contracting. He currently holds a number of technical certifications including VCAP4/5-DCA/DCD, VCP4/5, MCITP:EA, MCSE, CCNA, Security+, A+, and HP ASE BladeSystem. Outside of work, he enjoys backcountry camping, playing action pistol sports (IPSC), and spending time being a goof with his son. Muhammad Zeeshan Munir is a freelance ICT consultant and solution architect. He established his career as a system administrator in 2004 and since then has acquired and executed many successful projects in multimillion ICT industries. With more than 10 years of experience, he now provides ICT consultancy services to different clients in Europe. He also works as a system consultant for Qatar Computing Research Institute. He regularly contributes to different wikis and produces various video tutorials mostly about different technologies, including VMware products, Zimbra services, OpenStack, and Red Hat Linux, which can be found at When he is doing nothing, he likes to travel around and speak languages such as English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Italian.

8 Prasenjit Sarkar is a senior member of the technical staff in VMware Service Provider Cloud R&D where he provides architectural oversight and technical guidance to design, implement, and test VMware's Cloud datacenters. You can follow him on Twitter He is an author, R&D guy, and a blogger focusing on virtualization, cloud computing, storage, networking, and other enterprise technologies. He has more than 10 years' expert knowledge in R&D, professional services, alliances, solution engineering, consulting, and technical sales with expertise in architecting and deploying virtualization solutions and rolling out new technology and solution initiatives. His primary focus is on the VMware vsphere infrastructure and public cloud using VMware vcloud Suite. One of his other areas of focus is to own the entire life cycle of a VMware-based IaaS (SDDC), especially vsphere, vcloud Director, vshield Manager, and vcenter Operations. He was one of the VMware vexperts in 2012 and 2013 and well known for his acclaimed virtualization blog He holds certifications from VMware, Cisco, Citrix, Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Exin. Prior to joining VMware, he has served other fine organizations such as Capgemini, HP, and GE as a solution architect and infrastructure architect. I would like to thank and dedicate this book to my family. Without their endless and untiring support, this book would not have been possible.

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10 Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: Virtual Data Center Design 5 Virtual Data Center design principles 6 Best practices 7 Designing Virtual Data Center 8 VMware vcenter components 10 Choosing a platform for your vcenter server 11 Using the vcenter server appliance 12 Sizing your vcenter server 13 Choosing your vcenter database 14 vsphere clustering HA and DRS 16 Host considerations 16 Network considerations 17 Storage considerations 19 Cluster considerations 19 Admission control 20 Summary 21 Chapter 2: Hypervisor Design 23 ESXi hardware design 23 CPU considerations 24 Memory and NUMA considerations 26 Virtual NUMA (vnuma) considerations 28 Considerations for Java virtual machines (JVMs) 28 Network interface card considerations 29 Hypervisor storage components 31 Stateless host design 31 Scale-Up and Scale-Out designs 33 Summary 35