Section 1 – Create a vSphere Conceptual Design
Objective 1.1 – Gather and analyze business requirements
Definitions for this section:
Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected.
Larger companies will be able to provide this information as members will already fit into the categories below. With smaller companies, you may find that one person fits into the same stakeholder category more than once, or they may not know what category they belong to, you may need to assist with this as part of your design process. For example, there may only be 3 people in the IT department so you would expect one or more of them to be responsible for Compute, Storage, Network, and Security.
Ensure you meet with people from all stakeholder groups to fully understand the business requirements:
Reading:
Utilize inventory and assessment data from a current environment to define a baseline state.
Use tools to automate the gathering of environmental data. This will save time and remove the possibility of errors in the data you might otherwise collect manually or from people.
You may also need to gather realistic estimates for future workloads that the design needs to cater for. Try to avoid this from becoming an assumption.
Reading:
Analyze customer interview data to explicitly define customer objectives for a conceptual design.
During stakeholder interviews collect the following information
Determine customer priorities for defined objectives.
Ask for details in the interviews for project priorities and ensure you detail those in your requirements. This is also a chance to remove anything from the project that is not required.
Ensure that Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security (AMPRS) considerations are applied during the requirements gathering process.
For every conversation take notes on the following design considerations
Remember, requirements will be either functional or non-functional.
Reading:
Given results of the requirements gathering process, identify requirements for a conceptual design.
Once you have categorized requirements into the above sections, go back to the stakeholders with a conceptual design for each section. Remember this is an iterative process. Only once the conceptual design is approved should you move onto the logical design.
Categorize requirements by infrastructure qualities to prepare for logical design requirements.
Using the above categories, gather all the requirements together and put into the correct category. This will make creating the logical design a simplified and easier process.