VCAP-DCD Objective 1.1 – Gather and analyze business requirements
February 03, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
Skills and Abilities
- Determine the relevant data set required to understand the current customer environment.
- Given a design requirement and data set within a multi-site environment, determine which components would be included in a design.
- Given results of a requirement gathering survey, identify the business requirements.
- Given one or more business requirements, analyze and determine the impact of the requirements on the design.
Tools
- VMware Virtualization Case Studies
- Virtualization Assessment Tool
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize Your Servers
This is the first section I will be posting notes for from the VCAP-DCD blueprint. Talking about design is certainly not a concrete thing and everything may do things a little differently. The important thing to realize is each situation is unique and one design never fits all. I encourage your comments and hope that these notes can be the start of some good discussion regarding designing an infrastructure for virtualization.
This objective focuses on the topic of gathering and analyzing the business requirements. When we think of gathering the business requirements it is important to gather a baseline of the customer’s current environment. VMware’s capacity planner is a good tool to gather information on the systems the customer provides. There are other such tools to gather such as PlateSpin’s PowerRecon however I am most familiar with using VMware’s Capacity Planner myself.
If you leave the identification of the environment up to a manual process you will likely find a few things:
· Systems missed in their entirety
· A misperception of which systems are the heavy hitters
· Overall view of the environment that may not reflect the reality of the situation
Some design constraints from the design workshop are Usability, Manageability, Security, and Cost. A customer may have business requirements for some of all of these and your design must take these into consideration even at the earl stages of the design. Usability refers to usability from both an internal and customer facing perspective. Usability concerns itself with the performance, availability, and scalability of the systems. Manageability, Security, and Cost are more self-explanatory.
It is best to use some form of requirement gathering survey to find what the customer is truly requiring. Later on it will be important to take these initial requirements and transfer them into something that is a measurable and attainable goal that can be associated with a deliverable.
Now you will be left with a list of requirements, but initial requirements are likely to not be the final set of requirements. Why? Well sometimes the scope of the project will change, and by sometimes I would say almost always. Other times meeting all of the requirements at once may not be feasible from a time constraint. Or perhaps there is only so much money in this year’s budget and the cost of the implementation may far outweigh the monetary resources.
It is in these first stages of design that a lot of guidance may be necessary from us engineers. I have an example below that believe it or not is true. At a former employer one of the first things I was tasked with doing was deciding a virtualization solution for the branch offices. They wanted to use two Dell boxes that were about 6k a piece at each site. They also had requirements for it being as cheap as possible; in fact they wanted the whole solution to cost under 10k per site. They made no mention of backups, no concerns over remotely administering the machines, and blatantly ignored the fact that the two servers in total were already 2k over the budget per site. I eventually got past this price point but found there were many other things not in place such as highly available networking and backups.
A journey into virtualization requires peeling away at many layers of the infrastructure and having a good process of surveying these things is critical to a successful design.
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Sounds very open and kind of confusing on what to expect to be relevant during the DCD Exam. I guess my main concern would be the open-ness of the questions on “in the future they would like X.”
Hi Mike, thanks for your comments. To be honest I do not know what to expect exactly on the exam, nor would I be able to discuss what was on the exam after I do take it. My notes are going to follow the blueprint released by VMware generally though and they should be a good basis for studying.
My hope is to get a lot of good discussion going from these notes which will go much further in increasing my exposure to design then just reading and regurgitating the material.
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