Design areas and technologies

In your designs, you have to match all the following technology aspects to satisfy design requirements:

• Availability: How your solution provides a high level of services and infrastructure resiliency
• Manageability: How it’s easy and effective to be managed, also considering automation aspects
• Performance and scaling: How it can run workloads effectively by matching business requirements and how it can scale if more performance is needed
• Recoverability: How it can be protected and restored or reactivated in the case of a fault, a data loss, or an interruption
• Security: How it can be protected from different types of attacks
• Risk and budget management: How it mitigates some possible risks, usually related to business aspects

All those aspects must be matched to each layer of the technology stack, including, from the top to the bottom:

• Workloads and applications
• Virtualization
• Compute and host
• Storage
• Networking
• Operational

Design matrix

All of these will be discussed in the following chapters, with some specific hints for the different technologies. VMware vSphere usually stops (at higher levels) at the virtual hardware components, but you have to  also consider all the details of the applications and operating systems inside each VM.