VMware 3V0-21.23 - VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced Design

This strategy meets the requirements because:

Keeps data locally: By selecting a partner with a global data center presence, data can remain local to each specific location, meeting the geographical data residency requirement.

Quick scalability: The partner already has data centers in place, enabling the company to scale quickly and be functional within one month, which meets the timeline requirement.

Utilizes current processes: The existing processes around vSphere can still be leveraged since the partner can deploy compatible company architecture that aligns with the company's current infrastructure and processes.

VMware licensing costs: VMware licenses would be managed as part of the partnership arrangement, ensuring costs are aligned with the company's existing VMware infrastructure.

The customer has outlined the following requirements:

Automated deployment and lifecycle management of the vSphere platform: This requires a solution that provides automated provisioning, management, and updates. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is an integrated platform that provides automation for the lifecycle of the vSphere platform, including updates and patch management.

Self-Service deployment of virtual machines and other objects from a central catalog: VMware Cloud Foundation includes tools like vRealize Automation (part of VCF) that enable self-service provisioning of virtual machines and other resources. Additionally, VCF provides centralized management for provisioning and orchestration.

Monitoring, logging, and analytic tooling for visibility and troubleshooting: VMware Cloud Foundation integrates with vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight, which provides visibility, monitoring, and logging capabilities for the entire solution. These tools help in analytics and troubleshooting across the entire infrastructure.

Support deployment via infrastructure-as-code methods for additional management components: VMware Validated Solutions (such as vRealize Automation or vRealize Orchestrator) provide infrastructure-as-code capabilities, ensuring that the solution can be deployed in a consistent, repeatable manner, automating deployments of not just vSphere but also additional management components.

Cost-effectiveness with a fast time to value: VMware Cloud Foundation offers an integrated solution that is pre-configured and validated, which speeds up deployment and reduces operational complexity. By using VMware Validated Solutions for additional management components, the customer can leverage existing, tested solutions that are optimized for use with VCF, ensuring cost-effectiveness while meeting requirements.

Network I/O Control (NIOC) is a key feature available with distributed virtual switches (vDS) that allows administrators to prioritize and allocate bandwidth to specific network traffic types. It ensures that business-critical applications receive the necessary bandwidth and maintain a consistent quality of service (QoS). This solution meets the requirement to ensure optimal network bandwidth allocation and service consistency.

A clustered firewall solution must be placed at the perimeter of the hosting platform, and all ingress and egress network traffic will route via this device:

This is a technical requirement because it specifies how network traffic is to be managed through a specific infrastructure element (the firewall). It outlines how the security device is implemented in the network architecture.

The hosting platform's security information and event management (SIEM) system must be scalable to 20,000 events per second:

This is a technical requirement because it deals with the scalability and performance of the SIEM system. It specifies how the system must handle a large volume of data, which is a technical characteristic of the infrastructure.

The hosting platform's storage must be configured with data-at-rest encryption:

This is also a technical requirement because it defines how the data should be stored securely, which is an implementation detail. It specifies that encryption needs to be applied to stored data, a feature related to storage infrastructure.

The solution will deploy VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus on all hosts within the cluster.

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus offers advanced networking and storage features that will support the required high availability, performance, and management capabilities. Features such as Distributed Switches and Network I/O Control (NIOC) are critical to meeting the business-critical application and performance requirements for the latency-sensitive stock trading application.

The solution will deploy a single vSphere Distributed Switch with each host connected to it.

A vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is ideal for managing network configurations centrally across multiple hosts, which meets the requirement for centralized vSphere operational management. It also ensures consistent network configurations and simplifies network management at scale.

The solution will configure Network I/O control to ensure that system-level bandwidth does not impact workload network traffic.

Network I/O Control (NIOC) is essential for prioritizing network traffic, ensuring that latency-sensitive workloads are not impacted by other system-level or less critical traffic. This is crucial for the performance requirements of the stock trading application.

Design phase: The purpose of the Design phase is to define how the solution will meet the specific requirements. During this phase, the architect works closely with stakeholders to understand their needs and translate those needs into a technical design. A key activity in this phase often involves refining the solution details through interviews and discussions with key stakeholders to ensure that the design aligns with the business and technical requirements.

Fibre Channel is the Recommended Storage Technology for the Brownfield vSphere Deployment

Given the constraints of the brownfield site, the existing infrastructure, and the approved budget, the architect should recommend leveraging the existing Fibre Channel storage technology.

Here's the reasoning based on the provided requirements:

Utilize Existing Storage Array:The crucial constraint is that the budget is only for new server and network hardware, explicitly excluding the purchase of a new storage array. The solutionmustutilize the existing storage array.

Existing Fibre Channel Connectivity:The current storage array is already connected via Fibre Channel with a dedicated SAN fabric (2 x 8 Gbps interfaces). This existing infrastructure can be directly leveraged with new servers equipped with Fibre Channel HBAs.

Budget Alignment:Reusing the existing Fibre Channel SAN aligns with the budget approval for only new server and network hardware (to connect the servers to the existing SAN). Introducing a different storage technology like iSCSI or NFS as the primary method would likely require significant network infrastructure changes or additions beyond standard server networking, which may not be covered by the approved budget for "new server and network hardware only." While the arraycansupport NFS, the existing high-speed, dedicated storage connectivity is Fibre Channel.

Incompatibility with vVols:The existing storage array does not support vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA), which is a mandatory requirement for implementing vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). Therefore, vVols is not a viable option with the current storage hardware.

vSAN Not Applicable to Existing Array:VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage solution that pools local storage from ESXi hosts. It does not directly utilize external Fibre Channel SAN arrays as its primary storage pool in the standard configuration. Implementing vSAN would require a significant investment in server local storage, which falls outside the scope of using theexisting storage array.

Manageability:The existing vSphere administration team is responsible for operational management. Fibre Channel storage is a mature and commonly used storage technology in vSphere environments, meaning the existing team is likely to have the necessary skills to manage it.

While the existing arraycanbe configured for NFS, leveraging the existing Fibre Channel connectivity is the most direct and budget-aligned approach given that the SAN fabric and FC interfaces are already in place and the budget is restricted to server and network hardware for connectivity.

Performance refers to the system’s ability to meet the required service levels under various conditions, including handling spikes in memory demand. In this case, the architect is ensuring that the cluster can handle memory spikes of up to 20% without contention, which is a key performance requirement to ensure that the workloads run optimally during peak business hours.

The ability to accommodate these memory demands without impacting performance directly aligns with ensuring that the system performs as expected under peak load conditions.

This option aligns with the requirements for growth, scalability, and updating data protection operations. Using vSAN (Virtual SAN) Ready Nodes provides a hyper-converged infrastructure that combines storage and compute resources into a single platform, making it easy to scale both compute and storage without increasing the data center footprint. It also eliminates the need for traditional external storage arrays and allows for better data protection capabilities compared to the agent-based approach.

vSphere High Availability Restart Priority set to default at the cluster level

This option ensures that vSphere HA will automatically restart the virtual machines (VMs) on another available host in the cluster if a host fails. Setting the restart priority at the cluster level ensures that the VMs are restarted in an order that helps maintain the availability of critical workloads first, enhancing the overall availability during a host failure.

vSphere NIC Teaming policy: Route based on originating port ID set on the distributed port group

This setting for NIC Teaming ensures that network traffic is distributed effectively across the NICs, improving network availability. In the event of a failure of one physical switch or NIC, the Route based on originating port ID policy ensures that network connectivity for the VMs is maintained via the remaining NICs, enhancing network resilience.

vSphere Round Robin storage multi-pathing policy set on each ESXi host

Setting the Round Robin storage multi-pathing policy helps distribute I/O across multiple paths to the storage system, ensuring that VM storage remains highly available. If one path fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to other available paths, ensuring minimal disruption to VM storage and improving overall availability in the event of storage path failures.