VSphere Design Best Practices.

Print version record.

Cover; Copyright; Credits; About the Authors; About the Reviewers; www.PacktPub.com; Table of Contents; Preface; Chapter 1: Virtual Data Center Design; Virtual Data Center design principles; Best practices; Designing Virtual Data Center; VMware vCenter components; Choosing a platform for your vCenter server; Using the vCenter server appliance; Sizing your vCenter server; Choosing your vCenter database; vSphere clustering -- HA and DRS; Host considerations; Network considerations; Storage considerations; Cluster considerations; Admission control; Summary; Chapter 2: Hypervisor Design.

ESXi hardware designCPU considerations; Memory and NUMA considerations; Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) considerations; Considerations for Java virtual machines (JVMs); Network interface card considerations; Hypervisor storage components; Stateless host design; Scale-Up and Scale-Out designs; Summary; Chapter 3: Storage Design; Storage protocols; Fibre Channel (FC); iSCSI; Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE); NFS; Virtual machine filesystems; VMFS; RDM; NFS; Designing storage; Local storage considerations; Datastore and cluster design; VMware storage features; Configurable storage features; SIOC.

Configuring the multipathing path selection policyProvisioning; Summary; Chapter 4: Network Design; Introducing vSphere switching; vNetwork Standard Switches (vSS); vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDS); Common networking design considerations; Best practices to implement in your design; Implementing Network I/O Control (NIOC); Providing network redundancy, resiliency, and throughput; Physical switches and adapters; ESXi host hardware; Considerations when using IP storage; Separating your traffic; Validating your storage configurations; Summary; Chapter 5: Virtual Machine Design.

Virtual machine resources and templatesBest practices for virtual machines and templates; Over-allocation can be a painful proposition; Physical to virtual migrations; Multi-vCPU considerations; Shares, limits, and reservations; Configuring shares; Limits; Reservations; Causes of virtual machine performance problems; CPU performance issues; Memory performance issues; Storage performance issues; Network performance issues; Summary; Chapter 6: Business Critical Applications; Special considerations for tier 1 applications; Starting simple; Workload profiles; Designing for Microsoft Exchange.

Considering Microsoft SQL serverHA, DRS, and vMotion considerations; Resource considerations; Ensuring high availability and application resiliency; Enabling CPU Hot Add in vSphere client; The vCenter operations manager dashboard; Other business critical application resources; Summary; Chapter 7: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity; The benefits of disaster avoidance; Designing backup strategies; Designing for RPO and RTO requirements; Choosing replication technologies; VMware vSphere Replication; Storage-based replication; Mixing replication solutions.

Planning and testing the DR strategy.

An easy-to-follow guide full of hands-on examples of real-world design best practices. Each topic is explained and placed in context, and for the more inquisitive, there are more details on the concepts used. If you wish to learn about vSphere best practices and how to apply them when designing virtual, high performance, reliable datacenters that support business critical applications to work more efficiently and to prepare for official certifications, this is the book for you. Readers should possess a good working knowledge of vSphere as well as servers, storage, and networking.

English.

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