Lab: Sizing & Design Exercise

Design a VergeOS deployment for a customer scenario, including topology selection and hardware sizing.

Objective

Given a fictional customer scenario, you will evaluate requirements, select an appropriate VergeOS topology, size the hardware, and produce a deployment diagram.

Prerequisites

• Completed Module 1: Architecture Fundamentals
• Completed Module 2 reading (Hardware Requirements, Reference Architectures, Customer Scoping)
• Access to VergeOS reference architecture documentation

Difficulty

Beginner -- Step-by-step guidance provided

Estimated Time

1 hour

Steps

Part 1: Requirements Gathering

Review the following customer scenario and extract the key sizing inputs.

Scenario: A mid-size logistics company needs to consolidate 3 aging VMware clusters (40 VMs total) onto VergeOS. They run a mix of Windows Server (AD, file services, SQL Server) and Linux (web apps, monitoring). Peak memory usage across all VMs is ~384 GB. Total storage consumed is 12 TB with 20% annual growth expected. They have a single datacenter with one network rack and want high availability.

Questions to answer:

1. What is the total vCPU, memory, and storage requirement?
2. What growth runway should you plan for (1-year, 3-year)?
3. What availability requirements exist?
4. Are there any workloads that need special consideration (e.g., SQL Server IOPS)?

Part 2: Topology Selection

Based on your requirements analysis:

1. Should this be an HCI or UCI deployment? Why?
2. How many nodes do you recommend?
3. What node roles are needed (controller, scale-out, storage-only, compute-only)?
4. Which reference architecture is the closest starting point?

Part 3: Hardware Sizing

Produce a bill of materials for each node:

1. CPU model and core count
2. Memory per node
3. Storage configuration (boot drive, performance tier (e.g., NVMe for Tier 1), capacity tier (e.g., HDD for Tier 4), Tier 0 metadata NVMe on controller nodes (3 DWPD or equivalent; 1 minimum, 2 recommended))
4. Network interfaces (how many, what speed)

Part 4: Diagram

Draw or describe a topology diagram showing:

1. Node layout (which nodes, which roles)
2. Network connections (core fabric, external)
3. Storage tiers
4. How HA is achieved

Verification

Your design is complete when you can answer yes to all of the following:

• Total resources meet or exceed the customer's current usage + growth plan
• The topology provides high availability (no single point of failure)
• Network design includes redundant core fabric connections
• Storage is sized with appropriate tier separation (fast tier for performance-sensitive workloads, capacity tier for archive/snapshots)
• Controller nodes include Tier 0 metadata NVMe (3 DWPD or equivalent; 1 minimum, 2 recommended)
• You can justify your HCI vs UCI decision with specific customer requirements