Caution, this post is highly opinionated.

I am deep into the process of completing my VCDX design documentation and application for (hopefully) a Q2 2017 defense. As it so happens, a short conversation was had on Twitter today regarding a post on the VMware Communities site for the VMware Validation Design for SDDC 3.x, including a new design decision checklist.

twitter-screen

The latest version of the VMware Validated Design (VVD) is a pretty awesome product for customers to reference when starting out on their private cloud journey. That being said, it is by no means a VCDX design or a set of materials that could simply be re-purposed for a VCDX design.

Why? Because there are no customer requirements.

For the same reason a hypothetical (or fake) design is often discouraged by people in the VCDX community, the VVD suffers from the same issue. In a vacuum you can make any decision you want, because there are no ramifications from your design decision. In the real-world this is simply not the case.

Taking a look at the Design Decisions Checklist, it goes through the over 200 design decisions the VVD made in the course of developing the reference architecture. The checklist does a good job of laying out the fields the design decision covers, like:

  • Design Decision
  • Design Justification
  • Design Implication

Good material. But if you’ve read my other post on design decisions, which you may or may not agree with, it highlights that a decision justification is made based on a requirement.

Let’s take a look at just one of the design decisions made by the VVD product and highlighted in the checklist.

vvd_decision_screencap

The decision is to limit a single compute pod to a single physical rack, as in no cross-rack clusters. Sounds like a reasonable decision, especially if the environment had a restriction on L2 boundaries or some other requirement. But what if I have a customer requirement that said a compute node must be able to join any compute pod (cluster) regardless of physical rack location within a data center?

Should I ignore that requirement because the VVD says to do otherwise?

Of course not.

My issue with the Twitter conversation is two-fold:

  1. The VVD design decisions are not in fact design decisions, but design recommendations. They can be used to help a company, group or architect to determine, based on their requirements, which of these “decisions” should be leveraged within their environment. They are not die-hard decisions that must be adhered to.
  2. From a VCDX perspective, blindly assuming you could copy/paste any of these design decisions and use them in a VCDX defense is naive. You must have a justification for every design decision made and it has to map back to a customer requirement, risk or constraint.

I also do not think that is what  was saying when he initially responded to the Tweet about the checklist. I do think though that some people may actually think they can just take the VVD, wrap it in a bow and call it good.

My suggestion is to take the VVD design documentation and consider it reference material, just like the many other great books and online resources available to the community. It won’t work for everyone, because every design has different requirements, constraints and risks. Take the bits that work for you and expand upon them. Most importantly, understand why you are using or making that design decision.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.

Again, this post is highly opinionated from my own limited perspective. Do not mistake it for the opinion of VMware or any VCDX certified individuals.