VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 1.2 Gather and analyze application requirements

This blog post covers objective 1.2 (Gather and analyze application requirements) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The first objective of the exam prep guide has covered the business requirements. Now we have to do similar for the affected applications.

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • 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

Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario

As a result of our already done work, we should know with what applications we have to deal in our project. Now ee have to gather the requirements of those applications. The necessary techniques are already known to us:

  • interviews with the relevant stakeholders and/ or developers or engineers
  • existing documentation about the deployment
  • our documented baseline from objective 1.1
  • vendor documentation/ support/ knowledge base articles

It is pretty important to understand what requirements these applications have. It depends on the workload and the applications itself. Tools like perfmon or capacity planning tools can help us to get a solid knowledge about the current and planned capacity/ performance requirements.

But we should not only focus on performance. There is much more to take into account, to be more specific: AMPRS

It stands for

  • Availability
  • Manageability
  • Performance
  • Recoverability, and
  • Security

You can read an detailed explanation here.

Determine the requirements for a set of applications that will be included in the design

This is similar to the written above. When we talk about a set of applications, we have to take the dependencies between these applications into account.

Collect information needed in order to identify application dependencies

To gain the necessary information, we have to talk to the right people, which means that we have to talk to developers, engineers and/ or end-users. We have to deep dive into existing customer and/ or vendor documentation. And we need to use the right tools to map the found dependencies. This can be done with Microsoft Visio, OmniGraffle or similar.

Given one or more application requirements, determine the impact of the requirements on the design

With the knowledge about the applications and the dependencies between them, it is time to make some design decisions. These decisions must support the documented requirements, especially when we think about the requirements in regard of availability, manageability, performance, recoverability, and security.

The key is to understand the impact of the made decisions for the rest of the design.

Summary

I will try to summarize this objective. The last blog post has covered the business requirements and the process from gathering the required information, over the documentation, until the point at which we can start creating a design. This blog post covers the same, but not for the business requirements, but for the applications and the requirements of these applications.

We can gather the necessary information by talking to the relevant stakeholders, engineers, developers etc. Customer and/ or vendor documentation and other sources can be used to get a better understanding of the different application requirements. We also need to understand the dependencies between the different applications, especially if only a subset of applications is virtualized. Our work is supported by different tools, especially for performance analysis, capacity planning and documentation.

With the gathered information we will able to make design decisions that fulfill the requirements (Think about AMPRS).