Over the many years I have been working with VMware products, I have been involved with countless Virtualization projects where I have made numerous Architectural Decisions in order to ensure the solution met (and hopefully exceeded) the customers Requirements while working within their Constraints.

The goal of this section is to share a variety of Architectural Decisions I have made to assist the Virtualization community making decisions relating to your current and future Virtualization solutions.

I will be aiming to show examples of decisions which align with best practices, and more importantly, ones that don’t.

For those aspiring to achieve the VCDX certification, the information in this section should help you fully understand & justify your decisions. Being able to justify your decisions is a critical component of creating solid architecture, and an important thing to remember for your VCDX preparation, and especially your defense!

I will be aiming to regularly update this section with new decisions with the goal of creating a database of example decisions to help streamline the process of making your architectural decisions.

I am hoping this section also sparks discussion and I welcome any feedback and will update the section where appropriate to ensure all example Architectural Decisions are as accurate and complete as possible.

VMware Architectural Decision Register

The below register is a teaser of things to come. If you are having problems making a decision OR just interested in a specific architectural decision please leave a comment and I can prioritize the order in which I add the decisions.

VMware vCenter

VMware High Availability (HA)

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware EVC

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (Added: December 15th 2012)

VMware Power Management (DPM & Advanced Power Management)



Distributed Power Management usage (Coming Soon) Advanced Power Management for vSphere Clusters with Business Critical Applications (Added: May 27th 2013)

Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

VMware vNetworking

VMware Storage

ESXi Host Hardware



Management Cluster ESXi Host Hardware (Coming Soon) IaaS Cluster ESXi Host Hardware (Coming Soon) ESXi Host Hardware Sizing – Example 1 (Added 29th June 2013)

vCloud Director (vCD)



Provider Virtual Datacenters (Coming Soon) vCloud Management Servers Cluster (Coming Soon) BC/DR Solution for vCloud Director (Added: March 6th 2013) Allocation Models for Single Tenant Environment (Coming soon)

VMware Horizon View (VDI)



Virtual Machine (VM)



Time Synchronization for Virtual Machines (Added: December 12th 2012) Running Defrag utilities in Guest Operation Systems (Coming Soon)

Business Critical Applications (BCAs)



Hyperthreading and Business Critical Applications – Exchange 2013 (Added: August 14th 2013) More Coming Soon

Architectural Decision Flowcharts

This is a new series I have decided to kick off to compliment my example architectural decisions series and assist virtualization architects in making the most suitable architectural decisions for their solutions.

1. Storage DRS (SDRS)

2. vSphere 5.1 Single Sign On (SSO)

3. More to come!