Skills and Abilities

• Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected.
• Utilize inventory and assessment data from a current environment to define a baseline state.
• Analyze customer interview data to explicitly define customer objectives for a conceptual design
• Determine customer priorities for defined objectives.
• Ensure that Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security (AMPRS) considerations are applied during the requirements gathering process.
• Given results of the requirements gathering process, identify requirements for a conceptual design.
• Categorize requirements by infrastructure qualities to prepare for logical design requirements.

Skills and Abilities

• Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario.
• Determine the requirements for a set of applications that will be included in the design.
• Collect information needed in order to identify application dependencies.
• Given one or more application requirements, determine the impact of the requirements on the design.

Skills and Abilities

• Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions.
• Given a statement, determine whether it is a risk, requirement, constraint, or an assumption.
• Analyze impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions.

Skills and Abilities

• Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements.
• Build non-functional requirements into a specific logical design.
• Translate stated business requirements into a logical design.
• Incorporate the current state of a customer environment into a logical design.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vSphere design.
• Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies.
• Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes.
• Determine service dependencies for logical components.
• Include service dependencies in a vSphere 6.x Logical Design.
• Analyze services to identify upstream and downstream service dependencies.
• Navigate logical components and their interdependencies and make decisions based upon all service relationships.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate which logical availability services can be used with a given vSphere solution.
• Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to availability.
• Describe the concept of redundancy and the risks associated with single points of failure
• Explain class of nines methodology
• Determine availability component of service level agreements (SLAs) and service level management processes
• Determine potential availability solutions for a logical design based on customer requirements.
• Create an availability plan, including maintenance processes.
• Balance availability requirements with other infrastructure qualities.
• Analyze a vSphere design and determine possible single points of failure.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate which management services can be used with a given vSphere Solution.
• Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to management.
• Differentiate available command line-based management tools (PowerCLI, vMA etc.)
• Evaluate VMware Management solutions based on customer requirements.
• Build interfaces into the logical design for existing operations practices.
• Address identified operational readiness deficiencies
• Define Event, Incident and Problem Management practices.
• Analyze Release Management practices
• Determine request fulfillment and release management processes.
• Determine requirements for Configuration Management
• Define change management processes based on business requirements.
• Based on customer requirements, identify required reporting assets and processes

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate logical performance considerations for a given vSphere solution.
• Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to performance.
• Analyze current performance, identify and address gaps when building the logical design
• Using a conceptual design, create a logical design that meets performance requirements
• Determine performance-related functional requirements based on given non-functional requirements and service dependencies.
• Define capacity management practices and create a capacity plan
• Incorporate scalability requirements into the logical design
• Determine a performance component for service level agreements and service level management processes.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate which logical recoverability services are available for a given vSphere solution.
• Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to recoverability.
• Determine Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solution options for a given vSphere Design.
• Given recoverability requirements, analyze services that will be impacted and provide a recovery plan for impacted services.
• Plan a data retention policy based on customer requirements.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate which security services can be used with a given vSphere solution.
• Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to security.
• Build specific regulatory compliance requirements into the logical design.
• Analyze application and infrastructure security requirements.
• Build a role-based access model and map roles to services.
• Build a security policy based on existing security requirements and IT governance practices.
• Incorporate customer risk tolerance into the security policy.
• Assess the services that will be impacted and create an access management plan.
• Determine the proper security solution that would satisfy a regulatory requirement.
• Based on stated security requirements, analyze the current state for compliance/non-compliance.

Skills and Abilities

• Analyze design decisions and options selected from the logical design
• Determine impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions in a given vSphere design.
• Based on business requirements, determine the appropriate roles for each staff member.

Skills and Abilities

• Analyze VLAN options with respect to virtual and physical switches.
• Given business requirements, determine the design for virtual network components:
  • STP
  • Jumbo Frames
  • Load-balancing
  • Trunking and link aggregation groups
• Evaluate network redundancy considerations for a given design.
• Analyze design for inclusion of Network I/O Control capabilities.
• Determine use case for multiple TCP/IP stacks in a given design.
• Based on given functional requirements for each service:
  • Determine the most appropriate networking technologies for the design
  • Implement the service based on the required infrastructure qualities (AMPRS.)
• Analyze design for appropriate network teaming and failover solution.
• Determine network security and firewall requirements for a virtual network design
• Based on service level requirements, determine appropriate network performance characteristics.
• Given a current network configuration as well as technical requirements and constraints, determine the appropriate virtual switch solution:
  • vSphere Standard Switch
  • vSphere Distributed Switch
  • NSX
  • Hybrid solutions
• Based on an existing logical design, determine appropriate host networking resources.
• Properly apply converged networking considering VMware best practices.

Skills and Abilities

• Evaluate criteria, capabilities and limitations between storage types (Block, NAS, Object Based)
• In a given design, determine Storage Policy availability and performance characteristics
• Based on the logical design and given functional requirements, for each service:
  • Determine the most appropriate storage technologies for the design
  • Implement the service based on the required infrastructure qualities
• Ensure storage array capabilities are supported in a vSphere 6.x design:
  • Active/Active, Active/Passive
  • ALUA, VAAI, VASA
  • PSA (including PSPs and SATPs)
• Based on service level requirements include VMware technologies in the design, such as:
  • Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control
  • Storage Policies
  • Storage vMotion
  • Storage DRS
  • Virtual SAN
• Given the functional requirements, size the storage for capacity, availability and performance, including:
  • Datastores, RDMs, Virtual Disks
  • Physical Storage (LUNs, Storage Tiering)
  • Based on the logical design, select and incorporate an appropriate storage network into the physical design:
  • Block (FC, iSCSI, FCoE, SAS)
  • NAS (NFSv3, NFSv4)
  • Object Based (Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes

Skills and Abilities

• Analyze best practices with respect to CPU family choices.
• Evaluate NUMA and vNUMA with ESXi hosts and Virtual machines in a given design.
• Analyze the following in a vSphere design:
  • Enhanced vMotion compatibility
  • Implications of vSMP in virtual machines
  • Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and large pages
  • Resource overcommitment
• Based on the service catalog and given functional requirements:
  • Determine the most appropriate compute technologies for the design
  • Implement the service based on the required infrastructure qualities.
• Determine the impact of a technical design on the choice of server density:
  • Scale Up/Out
  • Auto Deploy
• Calculate the required number of nodes in an HA cluster based upon host failures and resource guarantees
• Evaluate the implications of using reservations, limits, and shares on the physical design.
• Specify the resource pool and vApp configuration based upon resource requirements.
• Size the following resources appropriately:
  • Memory
  • CPU
  • I/O devices
  • Internal storage
• Given a constraint to use existing hardware, determine suitability of the hardware for the design.

Skills and Abilities

• Analyze the use of an RDM or a virtual disk for a given VM.
• Evaluate Virtual Machine memory management techniques (ballooning, compression, swapping) in a given vSphere design.
• Based on business requirements, determine the design significance of VM Swap location.
• Determine the latency sensitivity requirements of a given virtual machine workload.
• Evaluate virtual machine features based on the logical, functional and application requirements.
• Use VMware best practices to size virtual machines according to application requirements.
• Determine if reservations, shares, and limits are necessary.
• Based on an existing logical design, determine virtual hardware options.
• Build a Content Library of appropriate virtual machine offerings (e.g. templates, OVFs, ISOs.)
• Determine appropriate use cases for vApps.
• Evaluate the suitability of using VMware FT or 3rd party clustering products (e.g. Microsoft Clustering, etc.) based on application requirements.
• Determine the impact of scheduled guest activities (e.g. anti-virus, backup, etc) to the design.
• Evaluate vFlash read cache requirements in a given design.

Skills and Abilities

• Based on business requirements, determine client access options in a vSphere solution.
• Analyze business requirements when integrating vSphere with other VMware solutions.
• Evaluate the impact of the VMware Certificate Authority and the VMware Endpoint Certificate Store to the design.
• Based on the logical design and given functional requirements:
  • Determine the most appropriate datacenter management options for the design.
  • Implement the service based on the required infrastructure qualities.
• Analyze cluster requirements:
  • Availability requirements for HA and FT
  • Performance requirements for DRS and vMotion
  • Storage performance requirements for SDRS and Storage vMotion
• Determine appropriate vCenter Server design and sizing requirements:
  • vCenter Server Enhanced Linked Mode
  • vCenter Server virtual appliance vs vCenter Server for Windows
  • Platform Services Controller
• Evaluate access control methodologies for creating roles and assignment of users to roles.
• Determine proper structure for access control settings (i.e. folders, resource pools, etc.)
• Develop appropriate host and virtual machine deployment options.
• Include in the design appropriate technologies for:
  • Asset management
  • Event, incident and problem management
  • Logging, monitoring and reporting