Planning vSphere4 deployment

Deploying VMware vSphere 4 is more than just virtualizing servers. A vSphere deployment affects storage and networking in equally significant ways as the physical servers themselves. As a result of this broad impact on numerous facets of your organization's information technology (IT), the process of planning the vSphere deployment becomes even more important. Without the appropriate planning, your vSphere implementation has the risk of configuration problems, incompatibilities, and diminished financial impact.

Your planning process for a vSphere deployment involves answering a number of questions:

• Will I use VMware ESX or VMware ESXi?

• What types of servers will I use for the underlying physical hardware?

• What kinds of storage will I use, and how will I connect that storage to my servers?

• How will the networking be configured?

In some cases, the answers to these questions will in turn determine the answers to other questions. After you have answered these questions, you can then move on to more difficult questions that must also be answered. These questions center on how the vSphere deployment will impact your staff, your business processes, and your operational procedures. I'm not going to try to help you answer those sorts of questions here; instead, let's just focus on the technical issues.