This document provides guidance on gathering and analyzing business requirements for a virtualization design project. It discusses identifying relevant stakeholders to interview, collecting inventory and performance data from the current environment, determining customer priorities and objectives, ensuring key considerations like availability, manageability, performance, recoverability and security are addressed, developing precise requirements based on the findings, and categorizing requirements according to infrastructure qualities to prepare for logical design.

1. vBrownbag VCAP6-DCV
Design
Objective 1.1- Gather and analyze
business requirements

2. Who is this guy?
Gregg Robertson
VCDX5-DCV #205
EMEA #vBrownbag Host
VMware Communities Moderator
vExpert 2011-2016 (hopefully ’17 soon)
Blog: TheSaffaGeek.Co.Uk
Twitter: @GreggRobertson5

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Associate a stakeholder with the information that
needs to be collected.
This is down to the questions you need to ask and also who you need to ask these questions. These
questions are ones you are going to ask during the design workshop for the design/project. For the
workshop you need to make sure you have the applicable project participants/stakeholders who can
join the workshops (depends if you want one big one where people come and go at certain points or
multiple ones where you speak to each business unit/ team). For the stakeholder meetings/design
workshops I personally like to try bring in the following people, this does vary depending on the
project and what has been chosen but 9/10 times these are the people you want to speak to:
› Virtualisation administrators (if applicable. If not already present then future
administrators of the solution)
› Server Hardware Administrators
› Backup Administrators
› Storage Administrators
› Desktop/OS Administrators
› Network Administrators
› Application Administrators (these are very important as their applications may have very
specific requirements)
› Security Officer
› Project Sponsors
› End users/ Developers/ Help desk personnel (this I find is helpful to find out what are the
current support desk tickets/problems the company are facing and if these will impact the
project in any way. Also these discussions are easy to have in the hallway/over a coffee
but have alerted me to unknown risks that would have severely impacted the design and
delivery)

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Utilize customer inventory and assessment data
from the current environment to define a baseline
state.
• Identify virtualisation candidates and applications
– Identify non-virtualisation candidates
• Capture baseline performance metrics including average and peak loads
– Feeds into capacity requirements
– Feeds into consolidation ratios
– Can be used later for comparison purposes
• Identify unique dependencies
• Identify reusable hardware for the design
• Some or all of these items will produce design decisions

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Determine customer priorities for defined
objectives.
• I think this is fairly straight forward as from the design workshops and interviews you have
collected what their objectives are and also ensured from all the workshops there are no obvious
conflicts of people’s plans for the solution they want you to design.
• A “normal” customer objectives piece would be:
• Virtual infrastructure capable of supporting consolidated country workloads.
• Highly available, disaster recoverable solution.
• Common standardised infrastructure.
• Simplified and improved support model.
• DR with VMware SRM and EMC RecoverPoint.
• Provide virtual infrastructure that can provide 99.9% availability or higher.
• Automatic virtual machine failover in the event of a host failure.
• DR of critical systems with 99.9% availability.
• DR of non-critical systems with 99% availability.
• Simplicity where possible to allow existing operations teams to manage the new
environments.
• Resilient and provide the highest levels of availability where possible whilst keeping
costs to a minimum.
• 30% growth of virtual machines and storage over the next four years.

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Ensure that Availability, Manageability, Performance,
Recoverability and Security (AMPRS) considerations are
applied during the requirements gathering process.
ID Requirement Design Characteristic
R101 The solution must deliver a virtual infrastructure capable of supporting all the
consolidated countries applications, data and services.
Availability, Manageability, Performance,
Recoverability, Security
R102 The solution must provide a highly available, disaster recoverable solution. Availability
Recoverability
R103 The solution must deliver a common standardised infrastructure. Manageability
R104 The solution must deliver a centralised infrastructure process and
management.
Manageability
R105 The solution must deliver a simplified and improved support model. Manageability
R106 Design must account for a 30% growth of virtual machines and storage over
the next four years
Performance
R107 The solution must provide an infrastructure that can provide 99.9%
availability or higher.
Availability, Manageability, Performance,
Recoverability, Security

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Given results of a requirements gathering survey,
develop requirements for a conceptual design.
• This should be relatively straight forward for anyone as you’ve now spoken to all the applicable
people and have taken down all their requirements and ensured there are no requirements
conflicts.
• Requirements have to be very precise so that there is no misinterpretation that could cause scope
creep and it forces you to ensure you know exactly what the customer requires and that they
validate this as correct before you start the logical design.
• For example a requirement of “Customer wants high availability” is far too vague as everyone
might have a different understanding of what high availability means. Your requirement should be
“Customer wants 99.99% availability for the front end portal and 99.9% availability for consumer
workloads outside of scheduled maintenance windows”.
• You would also include RPO and RTO values for these in my opinion in subsequent requirements so
that SLA mapping is clear.

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Categorize business requirements by infrastructure
quality to prepare for a logical design.
I’m glad this is mentioned here as for the VCDX they are very big advocates for mapping your
requirements to the infrastructure qualities. If you don’t know what the infrastructure qualities are
they are:
– Availability
– Manageability
– Performance
– Recoverability
– Security
So for example my previous concise requirement would fall under Availability, application of
PCI/SOX/Hardening guidelines would fall under security, and ability to run the 1000 developer
workloads would be performance.
This is also very helpful if you are doing requirements mapping from the conceptual requirements to
the logical design decisions to the physical design decisions.

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Questions?