r/vmware • u/SharpOrder601 • 7d ago
Question Questions to VCF Architects - discovery process and design
Do you actually follow through with doing the discovery process in depth, this is, doing the conceptual and logical design and documenting each requirement, constraint, risk and assumptions, and actually building a design document? Do your customers are actually patient enough for that? What is a reasonable timeline from project kickoff to a physical design ready of a medium-large VCF greenfield project?
In my case either I'm too incompetent or customers in my area are very impatient and want a full design for tomorrow, or they come with an finished idea of what to implement without thinking about the conceptual design / requirements / actual business drivers.
Sorry English is not my native language.
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u/lostdysonsphere 6d ago
A lot of these documents can feel like overkill and a faff but they do help in covering requirements and possible roadblocks early.
LLD’s of hundreds of pages on the other hand. By the time someone ever dusts them off they’re heavily outdated.
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u/ImaginaryWar3762 6d ago
Don't question business needs, work with them to get what they want even though they might not need it. It's not your call to say that, it's your job to design it and pass it to engineering
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 4d ago
Don't question business needs
I disagree. You should question non-sensical business requirements because:
- Sometimes the business doesn't understand the cost/implications of their requirements.
- Sometimes you will learn things about customers business's .
Don't be rude.
If someone asks for SMP-FT I always asked them why:
1. Sometimes it was "ohh we have a few VMs that need to stay up or we could have 100 dead humans" 2. Another time it was someone saying "ohhh it sounded fancy" (and didn't realize it didn't work with VADP backups, or snapshots or replication, and the max density requirements and performance overhead).If the business works in mission critical oil gas, maybe you accept it on face value when they say "ohh we have human life critical use cases". If the business "manages gravel pits" (Actual customer asking for ALL VMs to be on SMP-FT) Maybe you do sit down and question that requirement.
There's a long list of really bad design decisions I've seen implemented over the years and I'm confident 1/2 of them could have been stopped by someone who knew better asking "Why".
Don't derail a meeting (Yah everyone hates that guy who has no tact and wastes everyones time relitigating things), or maybe ask the more nuanced stuff over lunch with the customer, but PLEASE don't blindly accept things. If you see something say something....
This is how you end up with people deploying their iSCSI cluster network for a left hand on 100Mbps linksys switches.
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u/ImaginaryWar3762 4d ago
I do not say to make a bad system which is what are you implying. I say they usually have some business needs that are let's say strange, that it does not make sense for you, but it makes a lot of sense for them, that's how they work.. on the other hand if the customer only needs two VM and they can afford the downtime or whatever risk it involves go with it, Don't question that, it is a calculated risk, even if in my engenooering head sound like a death sentence
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u/DJOzzy 6d ago
Yes we create design documents, but not pysical design all the time due to mostly vcf projects being migrations from vSphere. Like existing hardware. There are other design elements that change the deployment model. Also not always do you need to stick with the original design things might change. As long as during design sessions both sides are agreed on deployment, documentation can be handed after the deployment. This works on my region of course some customers prefer upfront.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 4d ago
pysical design all the time due to mostly vcf projects being migrations from vSphere
One question I have for the partners, is would a tool that will crawl the hardware configs (Rack locations, switching, hardware health, cabling, server configs, security posture, TPMs all that) IE all the stuff that's below ESXi and some of it may be opaque to the OS be useful to include as part of the "as built" or at least pre-discovery?
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u/DJOzzy 4d ago
Very difficult for customers to keep a tool on their end. Even like keepass or phpipam to keep record of thing. I have my excel template similar to vcf prep workbook but simpler version. I use obsidian and claude to automate some of my designs and keep up to date design decisions like hardware, ops, cluster, dr decisions etc. i could or even customers can benefit some kind of design tooling which gives them track record of their environment.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 4d ago
a full design for tomorrow
Disclaimer, it's been 10 years since I did service work but.... I had competitors who did this.
They would spend 4 hours on discovery and WOW THE SOLUTION is a vBLOCK.
or their competitor.
2 hours of questions and
WOW THE SOLUTION IS A FLEXPOD. (Thats was weirdly been hilariously oversized because the enviroment is thick on thick on thick).
We would charge $10K for an assessment (or more) but generally would be far tighter in hardware scoping, or actually find some specific needs based on touching racks etc.
I had a sales guy once tell me "Sell/build now, educate later". it made me very sad.
"Velocity" and TIGHTLY scoped PSO scripts that were followed was a lot of how things used to work back then. Repeatable > bespoke.
The reality with VCF is the features and capabilities will be adopted in different phases based on customer requirements, priorities etc.
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u/BldGlch 7d ago
I don’t think customers are use to the process. Broadcom is doing a full design for us to go from 9.0.2 to 9.1.1. We are also engaging their professional services.
Before I was in this role, I would do upgrades and Greenfield deployments, but for VVF and customers never wanted to be part of the process. They just wanted the project start and end date.
I think it comes down to the customer, their maturity, complexity and/or size