VMware vSphere Design
VMsources specializes in in designing custom VMware vSphere environments specifically to suit our clients needs. Our datacenter architecture and design features highly optimized storage and networking while typically costing thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars less than hardware vendor provided solutions! Put quite simply, VMsources has no pre-concieved notions about your company's needs and we will not try to make your VMware vSphere deployment conform to a standardized template.
Because "It is VMsources mission to act as the clients advocate at every stage of the virtualization process; from design, through installation and configuration, to post-install support" and we don't sell hardware; we can be sure you always get the best and most competitive pricing available for your server hardware, network, and storage needs.
Hardware vendors will attempt to conform your virtualization needs to their product line and make your deployment follow a standardized template. Typical pitfalls of vendor-provided virtualization solutions include:
- Not enough SAN storage
- Wrong type of storage
- Failure to follow storage Best Practices for Virtual Machines
- Inflexible networking configuration
- Inadequate Documentation
SAN Storage is the single most expensive part of a VMware vSphere installation. Vendor-supplied SAN solutions typically present a single plane of high-cost storage, often leaving clients with little or no room for growth. This, conveniently, often results in the need for an expansion to the SAN within the first few months after virtualization, as the client fills-out their VMware vSphere environment.
VMsources specializes in presenting Tiered SAN environments which will perform better while costing less and provide plenty of capacity from the beginning! The trick is in presenting the right type of storage to each Virtual Machine, satisfying both performance and capacity requirements.
While a hardware vendor might spec 12 TB of a 4 Gbps SAN solution; VMsources will spec. 6 TB of a 10 Gbps SAN and 20 TB of a 2 Gbps SAN giving you more storage, better performance and costing less money.
Hardware vendors rarely (if ever!) concern themselves with anything other than presenting SAN storage (LUNs) to your VMware vSphere environment. The truth is that presenting the LUN's is only half of the job!
Virtual Machines which have not been internally "tuned" for virtualization have an excessive data change rate. This is not only problematic for overall SAN performance but especially for backups and site-to-site replication. If your Windows Virtual Machines have a 10% to 20% daily change rate (which is typical for an un-tuned Windows system) and you have overall 10 TB of Virtual Machines, than you have 1 to 2 Terabytes of data which needs to be replicated every day!
VMsources will help "tune" your Virtual Machines to run better on the SAN by implementing simple procedures which can reduce the daily change rate, potentially by half, without affecting applications or services.. Please read our Whitepaper on Windows storage tuning: 
Performance tips and techniques NTFS
- improve the efficiency of the NTFS (Windows) file-system by changing the "last accessed" behavior
- Relocating temporary files to LUN's which do not replicate
- Change the behavior of applications which manipulate the archive bit
There's no one "right way" to configure VMware vSphere Virtual Networking. Vendor-designed and installed VMware vSphere environments typically follow the "letter of the law" where Virtual Networking is concerned, but leave clients with an inflexible solution and/or a completely flat network. VMware vSphere ESX Servers typically have a minimum of six physical network adapters. While that may seem like quite a few, in reality it represents a minimum configuration.
In any VMware vSphere configuration, there are actually three distinct types of network: Storage/vMotion, Management, and Virtual Machine networking. In utilizing the minimum recommended six network adapters, the easiest thing to do is assign two of them to each of the distinct networks, ensuring redundancy.
Problem is: will two adapters be sufficient for each network? In the case of Management Networks on ESX Server, very little traffic is developed but redundancy must be maintained. On the other hand, iSCSI Storage networks can produce the heaviest network loads in your environment.
Hardware-vendor-designed solution |
VMsources-designed solution |
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