Introduction – Please Read First
These questions are here to assist with ensuring that you’re gathering necessary information from a customer/prospect in order to put together an appropriate solution to meet their requirements in addition to capturing specific metrics from tools like Collector or RVTools.
This list is not exhaustive, but should be used as a guide to make sure you’ve done proper and thorough discovery. Also, it is imperative that you don’t just ask a question without understanding the reason why it is being asked. We’ve structured these questions with not only the question that should be asked, but why we are asking the customer to provide an answer to that question and why it matters to provide an optimal solution.
Questions marked with an asterisk (*) will likely require reaching out to a specialist/Solution Architect resource at Nutanix to go deeper with the customer on that topic/question. Make sure you use the answers to these questions in the Scenario Objectives in Sizer when you create a new Scenario. These questions should help guide you as to what the customer requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks are for your opportunity.
This is a live document, and questions will be expand and update over time.
Server Virtualization
Generic & State of The Union Questions
1. What does your server virtualization environment look like today?
2. What do you find most challenging about your current environment?
3. What about your environment keeps you up at night?
4. What is working well in your current environment that you want to ensure is continued?
5. What does your cloud strategy currently look like?
a. Cloud First, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud, Cloud Stinks
i. And why has this strategy been chosen?
ii. Who is directing/championing this cloud strategy?
6. Where do you want to be related to the cloud over the next 1-3 years?
a. Is there a preference of Cloud Provider? I.e. AWS, Azure or GCP?
Architecture/Solution Specific Questions
1. What is your current x86 server vendor standard?
a. Are you happy with this vendor?
b. If so, what do you enjoy/appreciate most?
c. If not what do you find most challenging?
2. What is your preferred storage vendor for Virtualization?
a. Are you leveraging RDM (Raw Device Mappings) for your workloads?
b. If so, can you please provide some workload examples?
i. Oracle, MS CSV’s, SCSI-3 Shared Devices
3. What is your preferred storage vendor for Physical Workloads?
4. How do you currently connect your storage to your servers?
a. NFS, FC, FCOE, iSCSI
5. What SAN/Storage hardware is in place today?
a. HDD/Hybrid/All Flass/etc.?
b. How many spindles of each?
c. How many Controllers/Storage Processors?
6. What does the logical disk layout look like?
a. RAID Level?
b. Number of Disks per RAID Group?
7. Who is your preferred Hypervisor vendor and what version are you using?
8. How open would you be to considering other hypervisors?
9. What is your preferred Networking Vendor?
10. Are you leveraging Traditional 3-Tier Networking or Leaf-Spine Networking?
11. What does your networking architecture/rack design look like?
12. Are you integrating hypervisor networking and what are your current networking standards?
a. ACI/NSX/Arista/Cumulus
13. A collection of data from your current environment is needed. Can we use Nutanix Collector, RVTools (VMware), Dell LiveOptics, Microsoft MAP, Oracle AWR, or any other inventory collection you may have used to gather at a minimum, the following information?:
a. # of Virtual Machines
b. # of vCPUs
c. Current vCPU to Physical Core oversubscription
d. Current Physical CPU Model In hosts (for SpecInt Sizing/Comparison- http://ewams.net/?view=How_to_Size_the_CPUs_of_New_Systems_Using_my_Specint_Rated_Tool )
e. Allocated memory
f. Provisioned storage
g. Consumed storage
h. Largest vCPU allocation (for NUMA design)
i. Largest Memory allocation (for NUMA design)
j. Working set size (what will sit in SSD for Hybrid)-can be determined from daily incremental backups (https://www.joshodgers.com/2014/09/25/rule-of-thumb-sizing-for-storage-performance-in-the-new-world/ )
Backup & Data Protection Questions
1. What is your primary method for backing up Virtual Machines?
a. RPO/RTO
2. What is your primary method for backing up Physical Servers?
a. RPO/RTO
3. What is your primary method for backing up In-Guest or In-OS applications?
a. Veeam/Commvault/HYCU/Networker/HP Data Protector
4. Who is your preferred backup storage vendor
a. DataDomain/Netapp/Commvault-Hyperscale/Cohesity/Rubrik/DAS-JBOD/etc.
5. What is your backup storage strategy
a. Retention On-Prem, Drain to Cloud, ETC
b. Do you utilize the GFS, or Grandfather-Father-Son retention policy for your backup rotation scheme and if so, how many of each are kept? For example, 10 daily, 5 weekly and 1 monthly.
6. What is the average daily data-change rate (est. 30 days) identified through incremental backups? ( https://www.joshodgers.com/2014/09/25/rule-of-thumb-sizing-for-storage-performance-in-the-new-world/ )
7. Can you walk me through your recovery process?
a. Let’s assume you need to restore a VM, what are the steps, how long would it take?
b. Let’s assume you needed to restore a set of files or a database table, what are the steps and how long would it take?
c. Let’s assume you lost all your shared storage, how would you recover and how long would it take?
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Questions
1. Do you have a Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan?
a. If yes, can you Share? (If they do have a plan, but cannot give you a copy of the plan, then ask if they can step you through the plan they have defined.
b. If no, would you consider working with Nutanix to help develop this with you?
2. For Virtual Machines are you leveraging any specific SW solutions to help provide DR for your environment?
3. For your Physical Servers
4. Walk me through the process of recovering your operations at a DR Datacenter.
5. Are there any Active/Active Workloads?
a. If so, can they define what Active/Active exactly means to them. Is Active/Active a running secondary datacenter with tape backups available for restore, or data replicated to another SAN but no automated/orchestrated recovery, or is it a Metro/Stretch Cluster across sites, etc.?