April 14, 2014
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

VCDX Spotlight : Rene Van Den Bedem

Name: Rene Van Den Bedem

Twitter Handle: @VCDX133

Current Employer: Bank AlBilad, Riyadh, KSA

VCDX #: 133

How did you get into using VMware?

When I joined Bank AlBilad in 2009, we had a fledgling ESX 4.0 environment that was running some test workloads. Our Data Center was bursting at the seams with 200+ physical servers and the CIO agreed on the strategy to virtualise all physical workloads where possible, instead of expanding the Data Center and continuing down the physical server path. So someone had to own it and that person was me.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

In 2012, I convinced the Bank that a major investment in vSphere training (ICM, VSOS, Design Workshop) was required since vSphere was a critical platform for delivering infrastructure services. During that training sequence, I decided to lead by example and took the VCP and VCAP-DCA/DCD exams. From there I figured, “Is the design I implemented at the Bank good enough for VCDX? Let me find out.” Little did I know the time and effort it would take to get there, but I am glad I did it.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

vSphere Training started in September 2012, final VCAP exam in December 2012 -> 18 months to VCDX.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

Do it, but give yourself time to develop the skills necessary to succeed. If you want to evolve as an architect and be the best that you can be, DO IT. However, it is tougher for people who are non-native English speakers, use a fictitious design and have poor documentation skills. If you hate documentation, then VCDX may not be for you.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

Yes, during my first attempt, the biggest mistake I made was to not join a study group of VCDX-level candidates. Join a study group to push yourself and convince a VCDX to mentor you. Otherwise your chances of success will diminish to zero.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it?

Too soon to tell. But personally, it feels great. I have two years of blog posts that I have been saving up to distribute online.

April 10, 2014
by Gregg Robertson 24 Comments

Extra VCDX Experience achievement unlocked

Yesterday after ~450 hours of blood,sweat and daily mock panels I defended my VCDX design at the Frimley United Kingdom defences. The experience was much more pleasurable than I thought it would be and my panel were all really nice guys and I could tell they were asking me questions to try help me show my knowledge and strengthen portions where possibly my design was weak. Unfortunately when I woke this morning and checked my emails and after asking my wife to open the attachment due to being too nervous myself to do it ,it stated I was unsuccessful in my attempt.

I was certainly hoping I would crack it first time and be able to prance around like a pony at the next London VMUG with my VCDX shirts,caps,blazers and new tattoo (I’m joking on the tattoo but the rest I can’t deny I may have done Winking smile ) But all jokes aside I really learnt a substantial amount and can say without a doubt that I’m a much better architect than when I started the journey and it showed me where my knowledge needs strengthening for my resubmission in the future. I don’t think i’m going to resubmit this year for a few reasons, one being that you have to pay the entire submission fee again and I just don’t have $1200 lying around to do this but more importantly I am just looking forward to spending time with my family as I’ve been spending all my evenings and weekends for the past 6 months working on my VCDX. I will however resubmit and give it another go as I didn’t think i was miles and miles off and with more prep and strengthening in certain areas I could get it the second time around and there are numerous super intelligent current VCDX’s who only passed the second time.

There’s loads of great advice out there but i felt there wasn’t a large amount of portions from people who have failed and I can certainly understand the desire to crawl under a rock after finding out your result but i wanted to put out something around what I felt helped me for the defence yesterday as well as what I’m going to be starting to slowly go through in the next few months for my resubmit next year. However Rene van den Bedem one of my study group buddies and a newly minted VCDX #133 from the Frimley defences (without a doubt deserved) beat me to the punch on most of them in his posting this morning. So I’m going to list additional portions and complimentary portions around resources and things i felt are needed:

Try put in a design that is as real world as possible. I know this isn’t easy, especially as most companies are now 100% virtualised but there are loads of projects around creating a new environment for a new exchange environment or a new department in your company and how you designed it which i’m certain can meet most of the VCDX blueprint requirements. Also if you are going to fictionalise portions don’t try and put in too much as real world customers need to operationally maintain this after you leave and if you have done some no doubt amazing custom configurations but they mean when an upgrade is due you have to change half the environment then you will be called up on this.
Eat,sleep ,VCDX ,repeat. As you can tell by the hours I estimate I put into my submission ~450 and the hours Rene put into his two submissions ~1000, the VCDX is an all encompassing goal where you have to be willing to spend your evenings and weekends for months and months working on the design and there will be loads of points where you feel like giving up and you question why you decided to do this (mine normally came when it was warm weather outside and I was sat trying to decide on VMware security settings). BUT the amount I have learnt from it I fully believe and have already noticed tangibly has made me a better architect and forced me to gain new skills.
Join a study group ASAP. For this submission I had it planned in my head from almost the middle of last year when i passed my VCAP-DCD that i was going to go for the VCDX. I coaxed a whole bunch of guys I know from the London VMUG to put in their interest to defend this year at Frimley which partially resulted in there being two defences in the UK this year Unfortunately due to time blurring by I ended up being the only one to submit for the April defence but I created the EMEA VCDX Study Group after getting the idea from the guys who defended at PEX and was able to gain loads of feedback around my design from people with various backgrounds and thereby strengths in different areas and had a few trial by fire mock defences. I also had a core study group of Rene and Bobby Stampfle who were both also defending at Frimley and so we worked together and did webexs almost daily for three weeks and really learnt a substantial amount from each other and even did a face to face practice this past weekend to calm our nerves and try make the defence not as scary.
Gain help from the best. I’m fortunate enough to know quite a few current VCDX’s and as is the case with the VMware community everyone is really happy to help out where they can. I got a few current VCDX’s to review my design and not hold back on the feedback as what these guys will find you can bet the panellists will find also.I know there is a plan by John Arrasjid around the academy X program and how this will help people nearing the end stages of their VCDX designs to gain some 1 on 1 help from current VCDX’s and I was getting ahead of myself and planning to ask to be part of this when I passed my VCDX as I knew the sheer benefits this has. I will certainly be working with as many top people as possible as well as my EMEA VCDX Study group.
Go to a VCDX bootcamp and watch the online videos and the vBrownbag VCDX videos. These are really helpful and I attended the bootcamps at VMworld Europe last year and the one last week here in the UK. the one at VMworld was certainly a lot better possibly due to the amount of VCDX’s in the room and so the role playing for the two scenarios was much more beneficial than the one I had last week. I’ve refrained from ranting about why as I don’t think it was as helpful but I would encourage the time keeping of the VCAP bootcamp prior to be much better so that it doesn’t severely impact the VCDX bootcamp.
Keep your knowledge up to date and start your design right now. For the VCDX i submitted a design I worked on over two years ago and so with a lot of my current work being around vCloud and vCAC I was rusty on some areas and needed to refresh them. Rene listed loads of top books and I did a selective few of these due to time constraints to refresh my memory on advanced HA and DRS portions and storage. I think if I had slowly kept my skills up around reading tech books like I used to the sheer amount of things I had to refresh on wouldn’t have been as much and possibly made a lot easier. Also I got asked by quite a few people about if their older designs were good enough. I’m certainly not the expert around what is and isn’t VCDX level but what I would highly recommend is getting started on your design even if you still have VCAP’s to finish as it is a very long process and the more you spread it out over time and the amount of times you go through the better design you will have in my opinion.
It isn’t as scary as you think. I was a bundle of nerves for weeks before my defence but once I got in and met the moderator (i’m not sure if i’m allowed to make public the names of my panel etc so I’ll refrain from it in case) who I knew very well as well as almost my whole panel so it really felt like another VMUG or customer meeting but in front of my peers who were all really friendly rather than these levitating vBrains who sit on great thrones. The panel are there to tests your skills and will ask questions to try help you to prove your skills where maybe you haven’t scored very well and are certainly rooting for you to pass whilst being very professional. They will challenge your knowledge but the thought that they are out to catch you out with crazy abstract questions is a total myth (maybe it’s just something I had in my mind)
I’m disappointed without a shadow of a doubt that I didn’t pass it this time but I’m certainly glad I did it and I would recommend the journey to anyone looking to try force themselves to the next level. As I’ve stated I’m going to take a breather to recharge and spend time with the family but I will give it another go and fully believe that with more planning I can do it next time.

Good luck to all of those defending this year and hopefully you have a better result than me.

Gregg

February 27, 2014
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Derek Seaman

Name: Derek Seaman

Twitter Handle: @vDerekS

Blog URL: www.derekseaman.com

Current Employer: Nutanix

VCDX #: 125

How did you get into using VMware?

In 2006 I was a Sr. Unified Communications Consultant and used VMware Workstation on my home computer to try out various software products. By 2008 I had some customers wanting to virtualize Exchange and other services, but my exposure to the ESX platform was still limited. In 2009 I started a new job as a Lead Systems Engineer for a U.S. Government project and took my first vSphere 4.0 install/configure course. After that course I was truly fascinated with the technology, breadth of skills needed, and the wicked cool features like vMotion. Ever since then I’ve focused on virtualizing enterprise services and VDI.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

Through my blog came to know several well-known bloggers and virtualization geeks. By 2013 nearly all of them were VCDXs and I told myself that I could do it. VMworld 2013 in San Francisco was a turning point and lit a fire to knock out my VCDX. I also figured it would professionally open up doors that might not otherwise be as open.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

I took my first ever VCAP exam (VCAP5-DCD) the day before VMworld 2013 San Francisco, and passed. A few weeks later I took the VCAP5-DCA exam, and was also successful. All told it was a six month effort from starting the VCAP pre-reqs and getting my VCDX congratulations letter.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

The certification takes a lot of time. How much time depends on the complexity of your design, and how much may already exist in terms of documentation that you can use. Not much existed for the project I chose, so I spent literally hundreds of hours writing everything to make sure it met the VCDX blueprint requirements. Also, get involved in a study group early on, so you can do peer reviews and support each other throughout the process.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

Overall I wouldn’t change anything, except getting connected with more candidates prior to the initial application submission. I had connected with two others, but didn’t know there were a dozen more on the same track. Definitely get on Twitter and find your peers.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it?

Social media blew up (in a good way) after getting my certification. After being accepted to defend for the VCDX but prior to my passing I had accepted an offer from Nutanix as a Sr. Solutions and Performance engineer. That team already has two VCDXs, and I couldn’t be more excited to join them and other VCDXs within the company.

The entire process was totally worth it. I feel that I’m a better architect, and made great professional connections with both existing VCDXs and those that went through the PEX 2014 process.

February 26, 2014
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Sean Howard

Name: Sean Howard

Twitter Handle: @showardvmware

Current Employer: VMware

VCDX #: 130

How did you get into using VMware?

I was working at a reseller in Seattle back in 2006 doing SAN implementations. The need to develop VMware skills was driven by fast growing customer demand for ESX. Once I had a couple of deployments under my belt, I was hired away by one of our customers where I was able to do it on a larger scale.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

It was mostly a personal challenge, but also to help build credibility with customers in my pre-sales role at VMware.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

3 years total. I did my VCP in 2011, VCAPs in 2012, then worked on my VCDX submission throughout 2013 on and off.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

I am not in an architect role, and I know a lot of people thinking about the VCDX believe that is an absolute requirement. It certainly helps, but it’s not a necessity. Though I will say hands-on experience is.

I know everyone says this, but really, truly read the VCDX Boot Camp book, and try to fully digest what is being said in it. Also try to attend the VCDX Boot Camp in person before you put pen to paper.

Get in a study group that does mocks. I lucked into one that was organized by Brad Christian. I doubt I would have passed otherwise. Also, don’t neglect the troubleshooting and design scenarios either. Practice those.

Spend 30 minutes every day on the elliptical, going for a walk (or whatever) and listen to the brownbag sessions, VMworld sessions, VMware related podcasts, stuff like that. It’s a great way to slowly absorb information over a period of months rather than trying to cram.

Finally, create flash cards for yourself on a service like Quizlet. I made almost 500 and had my wife ask me them. This forces you to say the answer out loud and work on crisp delivery.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

I made things a lot harder on myself than they had to be. For one thing, I could have just done a mostly real design, I had enough projects under my belt. However, I felt that the projects I had done weren’t “cool enough”. So I took a real project as a base, bumped the scale up, added in components from other projects, etc. So it was probably 90% “real”, but was a collage of designs.

Yes, this resulted in a more whiz-bang design, but was a far greater burden during my prep for the panel. I had to be able explain interactions between things that had never actually occurred in real life. Luckily, I had access to enough lab gear to mock things up so I could answer confidently, but this was a lot of work that could have been avoided.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it?

I immediately received a lot of recognition inside my extended team and several layers of management up. Of course people outside the company take notice and my LinkedIn got red hot pretty quickly. It’s only been a couple of weeks, so who knows what the future holds.

For me, this was mostly about proving to myself that I could do it. To me, that is its own reward.

February 18, 2014
by Gregg Robertson 4 Comments

EMEA VCDX Study Group

As some people may be aware, I am looking to defend my VCDX design at Frimley in April (tech review pending) and so wanted to follow the great example the guys from PEX set and try get some study groups going for VCDX for those people looking to submit and for people like myself who have submitted and are looking for mock defences for my design but also for the design and troubleshooting scenario.

Brad Christian posted a blog posting covering what the US guys did here for their mock defences and how beneficial they were. Everyone is welcome to join the EMEA VCDX study group (Current VCDX’s are especially welcome!!) although if you don’t even have you VCP yet then possibly waiting until you are further down the line is a good idea. I am hoping to link people up who are on the same level and path and create a “circle of trust” so that these people can share their designs for review and after submission for mock defences.

I have created a form for people to fill in (I admit i copied the idea of James Bowling and his US Study Group form) and have listed the VCDX-Cloud and VCDX-DT as if people are aiming for these then there isn’t likely to be loads of people able to review and help.

So if you are interested and very importantly feel you can make the time (4-8 hours for a review) to help people looking to submit and defend then the sign up form is below:

Gregg

December 3, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 2.1 – Determine Catalog Requirements for a Logical Design

Knowledge

Identify what can be included in a published catalog.

A published catalog is one that is created in the administrative organisation with all the required components and vApp templates published to all other organisations in the vCloud environment. Good design practice to only allow the administrative organisation to publish its catalog and deny this ability for all the standard organisations.
The components that can be included in a published catalog are:
- Standardised gold master vApp that can consist of a single virtual machine all the way to 3 tiered offerings like a web service with a web front end, an application server and a database server. These are verified templates that meet regulatory and security standards which ensures consistency across the environment and provides the consumers with verified offerings that can be deployed with ease.Guest customisation changes the identity of the vApp and can be used for post-deployment steps, such as the joining of vApps to domains.
- vApp Templates which can cannot be deployed but can be deployed (instantiated), creating a vApp that can be deployed and powered on.
- Media like ISO files for software and applications. These are also verified and commonly customised to ensure standardisation and to provide specific capabilities.

Identify what can be included in a private catalog.

A private catalog can have the exact same components but it is controlled by the user/group assigned the Catalog Author vCloud role. This catalog is limited to a specific organisation and good design practice states you should limit the ability to publish this catalog thereby making it a private catalog.
This can still contain standardised vApp’s and ISO’s and if you are a service provider this is where the cloud consumer will place their standardised vApp’s and ISO’s so that the organisation can use them but other organisations cannot.

Identify permission controls for catalogs.

There are three Predefined roles in vCloud that have varying permissions and rights to make changes and create components in catalogs. A breakdown of the predefined roles and their rights are contained in this documentation centre link

Explain the functionality of a catalog.

This should be straight forward as this is VCP-IaaS level and I think all the previous sections define it pretty well also. But just in case i have pasted the VMware definition below:
- VMware vCloud Director uses the concept of a catalog for storing content. Organizations have their own catalog that they can populate and and share the contents with other organizations and users.

All entities in the catalog are stored in a content repository system. The content repository, a component in the vCloud Director storage subsystem, provides an abstraction to the underlying datastores while offering features to store, search, retrieve, and remove both structured and unstructured data.

Skills and Abilities

Based on application requirements, determine appropriate vApp configuration.

As I mentioned for the published catalog and private catalog sections above you can configure vApp’s with multiple tiers to allow the organisations to provision these offerings in their vCloud organisation and maintain standardisation. If a customer asks for a web service offerings then you can provide them with a three tiered vApp with a web front end, an application server and a database server. There may even be a requirement for availability of the offering so you will created multiple front end, application servers and a clustered database back end.
Using the web service example this will also require different networking to ensure the security of the offering which will mean different servers connecting to different networks and vCNS endpoint devices being configured as part of the vApp. I am planning on creating a few of these as practice in visio so that I can visualise them and make sure I know what they should look like in case a visio style question comes up or i just need a good mental picture to make decisions for questions.

Determine appropriate storage configuration for a given vApp.

This follows closely to what I covered above but now you need to think of the storage offering the vApp components are going to be kept on and what storage you are going to allow the vApp to be deployed onto. Using my trusty web service example you wouldn’t want the database sitting on low end storage as this would severely impact the service.
This is what I think they are asking for so if you think i’m wrong then please do tell me as I’m also learning and sometimes it’s difficult to gleam what they mean as this could also relate to fast provisioning.

Given customer requirements, determine appropriate catalog design.

I think for this if you have created catalogs countless times and know what you can put in there and that they can be published to specific organisations from other organisations or published to all from the administrative organisation then designing it should be simple enough.

Determine the impact of given security requirements, on a catalog structure.

This may be numerous things but there are times when an organisation wants only certain vApp’s and ISO’s in a catalog to be available to certain people and so you can configure the catalog to have certain portions only available to certain people.
There are also many organisations who have very customised and important virtual machines which they have converted to vApp templates and they want these secured so that only a certain person can access them and only that person can provision them for people.

If you think I have totally missed something then please do tell me as I’m only learning and I’m certainly not perfect.

Gregg

October 9, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 1.3 – Determine Capacity Requirements for a Conceptual Design

Skills and Abilities

Determine how storage and network topologies affect capacity requirements for a vCloud conceptual design.

This in my opinion can be taken in a few ways so I welcome any feedback on if you think I have looked at this the wrong way but the way I am looking at this is the way it is all connected to differing portions of the environment obviously impacts the speeds that can be achieved and thereby the capacity of virtual machines that can be run over a certain link for networking or even over a specific NIC/Switch/HBA/Cable. So to use the networking topology as the example:

Network: For networking there are a number of constraints that can affect the capacity requirements for a vCloud conceptual design. To give an example I will use one that I am seeing a lot recently which is a 10Gb NIC connection from each blade/rack server in your proposed vCloud environment. For this 10Gb link you need to carve it up (either via native hardware methods or via NIOC) for all the varying types of traffic that needs to go over the link for your vCloud environment. Now if your network topology is inside an existing datacentre then you may have to connect to an existing top of rack switch which may only have the capability to provide two 10Gb connections per switch and the price for 2 new 10Gb switches (to obviously provide resiliency) won’t fit in the budget. So for the conceptual design if you need 10Gb of network traffic leaving each host to supply network requirements of the virtual machines on the host then you will need to either:

Change the hosts to have a sufficient number of NICs to provide this or
Go down an infiniband route or
Explain to the customer due to the constraint of having to use existing switches it is not possible to provide the required network bandwidth for each host so they will need to buy more hosts so that the virtual machines on each host get their required bandwidth.

This way of thinking applies exactly the same for storage and if you are running converged networking then it can be almost exactly the same.

Describe VMware vCloud Director and VMware vSphere functionality and limitations related to capacity.

This in my opinion is all about vSphere and vCloud maximums which is always something you have to keep in mind when doing a conceptual design as for example the linked clone chain length limit is 30 and then after this a new shadow copy is created which then utilises more space on a new datastore and affects storage capacity. Actually knowing these functionality metrics and limitations is something I have been learning from going through the vCAT documentation. I did think about listing all of them but there are so many and what they could impact is so vast I think this is something where you need to know the limitations and functional capabilities of the two products and then think of it in the holistic manner of the whole design and how it impacts the conceptual design. Now remember the conceptual design is the “napkin” style design and so product names do not feature but you need to understand at a certain level what is and is not possible from the products.
As I mentioned in my previous point if you feel I am totally wrong then please do tell me in a friendly manner as I am certainly not perfect and am doing this to learn.

Given current and future customer capacity requirements, determine impact to the conceptual design.

During your design workshops you will work out and record what the customer’s current and future capacity requirements are and then will need to plan for that 20% year on year growth they require to give an example. So if their current requirements can be met with eight hosts to be very simplistic then you will need to ensure you have sufficient capacity not just in compute but also storage, networking, cooling, power and switching.

Given a customer datacenter topology, determine impact to the conceptual design.

For this I think I covered it in the first section but you now need to look at the whole topology with storage, networking, power, rack space, distances between components, distances between datacentres, cooling and weight limitations to name a few off my head that may impact your conceptual design. So say for cooling you can only put in a certain amount of hardware into each rack which then impacts your conceptual design of how many blades can fit into the datacentre/server room.

Given cloud capacity needs, constraints, and future growth potential, create an appropriate high-level topology.

This is the point where you have done your design workshop and are now looking to do a high-level design of the environment that meets all the customers’ needs and shows to them you understand what they require and have planned for the future. The below diagram is a very basic version of what you would provide based on networking to show you understand their needs :

August 12, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 1.2 – Identify and Categorize Business Requirements

Knowledge

Identify discovery questions for a conceptual design (number of users, number of VMs, capacity, etc.)

These questions are ones you are going to ask during the design workshop for the design/project. For the workshop you need to make sure you have the applicable project participants/stakeholders who can join the workshops (depends if you want one big one where people come and go at certain points or multiple ones where you speak to each business unit/ team). For the stakeholder meetings/design workshops I personally like to try bring in the following people, this does vary depending on the project and what has been chosen but 9/10 times these are the people you want to speak to:

Virtualisation administrators (if applicable. If not already present then future administrators of the solution)
Server Hardware Administrators
Backup Administrators
Storage Administrators
Desktop/OS Administrators
Network Administrators
Application Administrators (these are very important as their applications may have very specific requirements)
Security Officer
Project Sponsors
End users/ Help desk personnel (this I find is helpful to find out what are the current support desk tickets/problems the company are facing and if these will impact the project in any way. Also these discussions are easy to have in the hallway/over a coffee but have alerted me to unknown risks that would have severely impacted the design and delivery)

The US vBrownbag for the VCAP5-DCD objective 1 had a great first slide on VMware’s 5 Step Design Process:

Identify the effect of product architecture, capabilities, and constraints on a conceptual design.

I may be looking at this the wrong way but I think this is actually around how specific products architecture, capabilities and constraints isn’t applicable in a conceptual design as for a conceptual design you are only creating a “napkin” design diagram of how the whole environment is going to be delivered.

Skills and Abilities

Relate business and technical requirements to a conceptual design.

From one of the VMware service delivery kits available to VMware partners they give a great breakdown of what requirements are and what business and technical requirements are:
- Requirement – Documented statement that depicts the requisite attributes, characteristics, or qualities of the system
- Business requirements – Describes what must be achieved for the system to provide value
  - System must provide self-service capability
  - System must provide x% availability
  - System must provide optimal scalability and elasticity
- Technical requirements – Describes the properties of a system which allow it to fulfill the business requirements
  - System requires a Web portal where users can log in securely and deploy virtual machines based on defined policies
  - System must have fully redundant components throughout entire stack (host, network, storage)
  - System leverages virtualization technology and associated features

As mentioned these requirements will be gleamed from the Design Workshops/Stakeholder meetings and then put into the conceptual design. This is where you would work out if the customer requires a private, hybrid, public or even community cloud deployment. For example if the customer requires certain data to remain in a country for regulatory reasons then in the conceptual design you know compute resources, networking and connectivity between that country and the primary site need to be available. The speeds, number of hosts, make of hosts and amount of memory and vCPU are not in the conceptual design as this is the “napkin” design just covering the concept of how it will all work out and may actually change once you get to the logical and physical designs.

Some example business requirements a customer may have which are ones I did for my VCAP5-DCD Design Practice are :

Number	Requirement
R001	Virtualise the existing 6000 UK servers as virtual machines, with no degradation in performance when compared to current physical workloads
R002	To provide an infrastructure that can provide 99.7% availability or better
R003	The overall anticipated cost of ownership should be reduced after deployment
R004	Users to experience as close to zero performance impact when migrating from the physical infrastructure to the virtual infrastructure
R005	Design must maintain simplicity where possible to allow existing operations teams to manage the new environments
R006	Granular access control rights must be implemented throughout the infrastructure to ensure the highest levels of security
R007	Design should be resilient and provide the highest levels of availability where possible whilst keeping costs to a minimum
R008	The design must incorporate DR and BC practices to ensure no loss of data is achieved
R009	Management components must secured with the highest level of security
R010	Design must take into account VMware best practices for all components in the design as well as vendor best practices where applicable

For Technical Requirements a great way of doing it is to break them down into sections like:
- Virtual Datacentre Requirements – eg: Allocation model Virtual Datacenters reserves 75% of CPU and memory
- Availability Requirements – eg: VMware vCloud Director (clustering, load balancing)
- Network Requirements – eg: Organizations have the ability to provision vApp networks
- Storage Requirements – eg: Different tiers of storage resources must be available to the customer (Tier 1 = Gold, Tier 2 = Silver, Tier 3 = Bronze)
- Catalogue Requirements – eg: Catalog items are stored on a dedicated virtual datacenter and dedicated storage
- SLA Requirements – eg: SLA Requirement #1 – Networking 100%
- Security Requirements – eg: Organizations are isolated from each other
- Management Requirements – eg: Only technical staff uses remote console access
- Metering Requirements – eg: Metering solution must monitor vApp power states for PAYG
- Compliance Requirements– eg: Solution must comply with PCI standards
- Tenant Requirements – eg: Customer requires the ability to fence off vApp deployments

To make sure you are doing the design in a VCDX-like manner which should push you to do it at a very high level, don’t forget to refine the customer-specific technical requirements and validate that they are specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and testable (SMART).

Gather customer inventory data.

This is what is going to be on the new vCloud system whether it is existing workloads or new workloads. A good way of getting this if the customer allows it is to run a VMware Capacity Planner collection on the existing workloads that are going to be migrated in so you know sizes, I/O and current state analysis values. The Capacity Planner can only be run by VMware partners so if this isn’t possible for you then manual collection and recording is going to be required. Another method is via the VMware vCloud Planner which is another tool only available to VMware Partners so maybe getting a VMware partner in to do this for you prior to the project running would be a good idea

Also knowing what the customer already has can help you understand possible future constraints for example that all their current servers are IBM and so this is likely to be the server platform for this design.

There may also be a requirement to use existing legacy physical kit already present in the datacentre which needs to be recorded and fully understood so that the risks and constraints of using this infrastructure are fully understood. For example if you are using legacy network switches which can’t do stretched VLANs this will impact your design substantially if you have two sites and a requirement for the Management cluster to be failed over/migrated in the event of a disaster.

Determine customer business goals.

This is plainly what is the customer looking to gain from the deployment of this solution? At the end of the project what do they hope to achieve? These are sometimes not as clear as you may hope as people have different ideas of what they want the solution to achieve so as the architect you will need to take all these business requirements, set expectations if they are unrealistic due to varying reasons like cost or pre-selected hardware and then define them and get sign off from the customer that they agree to these before any additional work is done. This is very important as if these aren’t defined and agreed to by the customer then scope creep can happen which could cause the project to fail.

Identify requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions.

I’m not going to go into great depth here as I think the definitions of each will give you a good idea of what each is. During the design workshops/stakeholder meetings these are worked out, recorded and agreed to by the customer. Always remember that for any design you need to collect all of these and then look at it in a holistic manner and understand the impacts of each decision.
- Requirements – Documented statement that depicts the requisite attributes, characteristics, or qualities of the system. See above portions around Business and Technical requirements plus the examples.
- Constraints – Requirements that restrict the amount of freedom in developing the design
  - Hardware which already exists and must be used (for example,host or storage array)
  - Physical limitations (distance between sites, datacenter space)
  - Cost $$$
- Risks – Potential issues that may negatively impact the reliability of the design
  - Lack of redundancy for specific hardware component
  - Support staff has not had any training
- Assumptions – Suppositions made during the design process regarding the expected usage and implementation of a system
  - Provides a sounding board for design decisions which must be validated
  - Hardware required is installed before vCloud implementation
  - Network bandwidth is not a limiting factor for external end users
  - Appropriate training is provided to existing technical staff
- For assumptions and risks I like to get these highlighted to the customer right away as you normally don’t want any assumptions if possible and for the assumptions you record in your design you want these to be realistically clarified already so that the assumptions are only there to ensure that if what they promised would be there isn’t you can refer them to the assumptions they signed off.

Given customer requirements and product capabilities, determine the impact to a conceptual design.

This I think is covered above in places but is also something you can only really learn from actually doing a design and understanding how requirements shape a design and what impacts each of them have. On a conceptual design it isn’t as much of an impact as in a logical and physical design but limitations like keeping workloads in specific geographies and the capability of vCloud stretched clusters between the two locations for example are something that will impact the conceptual design. I would also read the Service definitions listed below in the recommended tools from the blueprint and the implementation examples from the vCAT.

Tools

Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements
Conceptual, Logical, Physical: It is Simple
Private VMware vCloud Service Definition – This is in the vCAT
Public VMware vCloud Service Definition – This is in the vCAT
Hybrid VMware vCloud Use Case – This is in the vCAT
Product Documentation

If you feel I have missed something or am wrong on something then please do comment as I don’t proclaim to be the best and am always learning and welcome constructive criticism and feedback

Gregg

August 8, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 1.1 – Create a Conceptual Design Based on Business Requirements

Due to an imminent customer engagement I am due to be working on I have been refining my vCloud skills and dusty away the cobwebs. One of these tasks was to book the VCP5-IaaS and sit it so that it forced me to learn the basics again and be sure I had a solid base knowledge with no gaps. My experience of the exam and the resources I used for it are mentioned in my VCP5-IaaS Exam Experience blog posting. I have now been using the VCAP-CID blueprint as a structure for perfecting my vCloud design skills and so I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to take the VCAP-CID. I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here

Skills and Abilities

Distinguish between virtualization, automation and cloud computing.
- This could be defined in a number of ways (I’m more than happy to be corrected here) but the way I piece it all together is:
  - Virtualization is what VMware has been doing for years with vSphere and its complementing technologies. This is nothing new to anyone preparing for this exam and if it is then I hate to tell you this but this exam isn’t for you.
  - Automation ties perfectly into the NIST definition of on-demand self-service which is : Unilaterally provision computing, as needed, automatically without requiring human interaction
    - This can be done through multiple technologies and mechanisms like VMware’s vCenter Orchestrator, vCAC,vFabric Application Director and third party tools like Puppet, Razor and IBM’s Virtualization Automation solution. Without true automation you can’t have a Cloud.

Distinguish between private, public, hybrid and community cloud computing.
- These are defined perfectly in the vCAT 3.1 introduction document as:
  - Private cloud: A private vCloud (also known as an internal vCloud.) operates on private networks, where resources are accessible behind the firewall by a single company. In many cases, all the tenants share one legal entity. For example, a university might offer IaaS to its medical and business schools, or a company might do the same for various groups or business units. The private vCloud can be managed by the enterprise and hosted on premise or operated on a dedicated infrastructure provided by a vCloud service provider or systems integrator. In any case, a private vCloud must conform to the organizational security constraints.
  - Public cloud: A public vCloud offers IT resources as a service through external service providers and is shared across multiple organizations or the Internet. This can be viewed as a vCloud infrastructure that is operated by one organization for use by multiple, legally separated organizations. A public vCloud is provisioned for open access and might be owned, managed, and operated by one or more entities. A public vCloud provider might also support a private, community, or hybrid vCloud.
  - Hybrid cloud: A hybrid vCloud combines the benefits of the private and the public vCloud, with flexibility and choice of deployment methods. A hybrid vCloud consists of multiple, linked vCloud infrastructures. These distinct vCloud infrastructures can be private, community, or public, they but must meet a set of requirements defined by the providers and agreed to by the consumers. Connecting these vCloud instances requires data and application mobility as well as management. When load-balancing between vCloud instances (cloud bursting), use a consistent monitoring and management approach when migrating an application or data workload.
  - Community cloud: A Community vCloud is a specific public vCloud use case where the cloud is shared, and typically owned, by a group of organizations with a common set of requirements. In many cases, the organizations also include some level of legal separation. Community vCloud resources are shared, with some parts under central control and other parts with defined autonomy. A vCloud built for government, education, or healthcare might be an example of a community vCloud. A community vCloud can be offered by a traditional service provider, by a member of the community, or by a third-party vendor and hosted on one or more sites. It can be placed on-premise at one or more of the organizations’ sites, off-premise at a vCloud provider site, or both on- and off-premise.

Analyze a customer use case to determine how cloud computing can satisfy customer requirements.
- For this I would recommend you read the Service Definitions document from the vCAT as this covers all the definitions and how they map to customer requirements and fulfil these requirements. Also the VMware vCloud Implementation Examples document also from the vCAT shows you how varying implementations can benefit businesses in differing ways

Given a customer use case, determine the appropriate cloud computing model.
- This is one I feel you can only do once you have a firm understanding of the capabilities of all the different Cloud offerings and how each of them meet varying requirements and also have differing constraints/disadvantages.

June 4, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

Presenters wanted for the EMEA #vBrownbag

The EMEA vBrownbag team are currently looking for presenters to present on the EMEA #vBrownbag which is run live every Tuesday at 7PM GMT/BST. Currently we are covering several tracks which include:

-VCP5-DT exam blueprint objectives

-VCP5-IaaS exam blueprint objectives

– VCAP5–CID exam blueprint objectives

-VCAP5-CIA exam blueprint objectives

– Anything related to VMware or would interest VMware focused IT people. These can be VMUG presentations or even prep for a conference

If you are interested in presenting then please fill in the form here: http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/vbrownbag-presenter-sign-up/

Also please spread the word about the podcast and that we are always looking for presenters.

Gregg

Knowledge

Identify what can be included in a published catalog.

Identify what can be included in a private catalog.

Identify permission controls for catalogs.

Explain the functionality of a catalog.

Skills and Abilities

Based on application requirements, determine appropriate vApp configuration.

Determine appropriate storage configuration for a given vApp.

Given customer requirements, determine appropriate catalog design.

Determine the impact of given security requirements, on a catalog structure.

Skills and Abilities

Determine how storage and network topologies affect capacity requirements for a vCloud conceptual design.

Describe VMware vCloud Director and VMware vSphere functionality and limitations related to capacity.

Given current and future customer capacity requirements, determine impact to the conceptual design.

Given a customer datacenter topology, determine impact to the conceptual design.

Given cloud capacity needs, constraints, and future growth potential, create an appropriate high-level topology.

Knowledge

Identify discovery questions for a conceptual design (number of users, number of VMs, capacity, etc.)

Identify the effect of product architecture, capabilities, and constraints on a conceptual design.

Skills and Abilities

Relate business and technical requirements to a conceptual design.

Gather customer inventory data.

Determine customer business goals.

Identify requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions.

Given customer requirements and product capabilities, determine the impact to a conceptual design.

Tools

Skills and Abilities

Distinguish between virtualization, automation and cloud computing.

Distinguish between private, public, hybrid and community cloud computing.

Analyze a customer use case to determine how cloud computing can satisfy customer requirements.

Given a customer use case, determine the appropriate cloud computing model.