It was quite exciting to learn the designing stuff, kind of my first step towards the vSphere Architect role. The class was taught by Patrick Fong trainer from www.ivtsys.com at VMware Singapore and I find him straight forward and nice guy. It’s a slides based training class and one of the good things about that is it covers most of the topics and details, big or small, that are necessary from the VMware’s perspective but it leaves less time to discuss on the real life designs and the experiences. I want to see more production designs to talk about and little less theory as VMware has done a great job on white papers, documentation and knowledge base.
Although the first half for some of the attendees in the class was dry but I find it useful because I never thought of using the discussed approach while designing vSphere. It is very crucial to interview the stakeholders and have proper conceptual and logical design. This is where we should spend our most of the design time because if we get that right then engineering design is comparatively quick. The module talks about lot of things but in real life it’s always not possible to imitate that exactly. We should have some standards based on organizations objectives and following the standards with VMware best practices is the key of good design for an organization.
The second half was completely a technical discussion around storage design, very important in virtualization world. As per the rough estimate more than 50% VMware support cases are due to storage issues. It’s not a bad idea to reserve a good chunk of the budget for efficient storage in small-medium business and enterprise designs. One thing that I like the most is VMware and Storage vendors are working together to create plugins and providing good information about the storage allocation, RAID groups, disk etc. within the vSphere client so the Virtualization and Storage engineers have transparency about the platform while troubleshooting an operational incident.
At the end of the day we talked about a sample scenario and it was little brainstorming but I want to see that more in the class. I think overall I enjoyed the first day of the class and would recommend to all those who want to jump start their career in vSphere designing from administration.
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