Design of a vCloud environment

[truetaurus]

If I would like to design the environment for vCloud that can support at least 100 VM with say 2GB RAM and 2 CPUs each. How many hosts would I need and what sort of resources would I need for this?

[elgreco81]

Hi,

That's a very open question and the answer will depend on many different aspects.

Basically, the hosts you will need are going to be the same as if you weren't using vCloud (maybe one or two more)...but, there are so many factors in terms of design like:

- vShield

- Backup

- Chargeback?

- Internal or public cloud?

- Orchestration

- SRM?

- Lifecycle management

- High availability of VMs, hosts, network, storage, vCenter, etc

- Of course the kind of VMs you are going to use

- Storage considerations

- and a lot of etcs

There is an official VMware course for vcloud "Install configure and  manage" that you could use and also, I would take a look at this  Duncan's document to have an idea of at least one part of the factors  you could consider for the proper sizing.

http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CEMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vmw...

There's only this other course for design best practices.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=30901

Regards,

elgreco81

[tsugliani]

The best way to go, would be to check on vCAT (vCloud Architecture Toolkit).

It's available here : http://blogs.vmware.com/vcat/2012/09/vmware-is-pleased-to-announce-the-release-of-the-vcat-3-0-mater...

The download link is here : http://info.vmware.com/content/18305_vCat_Reg (You just need to fill up this form, but it's free don't worry).

This contains a fair amount of documentation when you want to design your own vCloud Infrastructure, and should help you in that process.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

[truetaurus]

But in terms of best practices and minimum requirements, what would you recommend?

[elgreco81]

Only limiting my answer to "number of hosts", for 100 VMs you are most likely going to need the same amount of hosts for a vCloud enviroment than for a vSphere enviroment.

This is only a very "irresponsable" guess from my side and only a suggestion as a start point, I would say 10 hosts with dual processor each and a minimum of 32 GB of RAM. Please not that this is not a proper sizing by any means. This is only a guess based on very little information and you should not make any decision based on this.

But please, let this number only be a start point only for you to have a very vague idea of the infrastructure that could be. As tsugliani posted, using vCAT is a much better start.

If you are thinking in making any inversion, please contact a partner.

Regards,

elgreco81

[RWhitelocks]

I agree with the others that this is a very open question as it also depends on your work loads.

Just as a guide, we use vCloud Director for development and test of software and as a result performance is not key. We give the virtual machines 1 vCPU and 1GB ram and using 2 hosts with two of the latest Intel CPU's with 6 cores & hypertreading and 64GB ram we are able to run approximately 100-120 VMs simultaneously.

This works for us a the vApps contain systems with very little CPU usage and we accept the performance hit due to the CPU ready.

That said this max's out the host and so there is no room for failure or redundnacy.

Therefore I would estimate you would need at least 4 hosts with a similar config, if your workload is lightly loaded and you dont need high performance or failover capacity.

However if this is a production environment then you will probably need to add 2 more hosts for redundancy and double again for the performance, so 10-12 hosts would cover it.

Again as the others have stated this is very rough guess and I would recommend that you do a pilot/proof of concept to evaluate your workloads and use the VMware sizing guides to spec this up correctly. This would be easier to do by getting a partner involved as they should have test systems already to use.

[truetaurus]

Thanks for that.

One other question, for the vCloud director cells. For the environment of say 200 VMachines, would 1 cell with 2x1GB Nics,128GB RAM and 4 3.2 GHz processors do for managing the environment?

[RWhitelocks]

We currently use one cell, I know we should have more, that has 8GB ram and 4vCPU and that is coping with our 100-120 VM environment.

Again performance could be improved but we havn't had to many complaints so from my experience the spec for your cell would cover it.

But don't take my word for it, use the sizing guides

[truetaurus]

thanks for that. And just to confirm, say for my 200 VMs I would like 4GB ram each and 1 vCPU of 1GHz. Do i really have to get hosts with 200 CPUs? or for exampple say I have 3 hosts each with 300GB RAM and 8 3.2 GHz processors. Would that do fine for this environment even though I do not have enough CPUs? So they would be shared?