Beginners Guide to VDC

The Servers Australia Virtual Data Centre (VDC) platform is a powerful and scalable tool to allow you to utilise the best of VMware-powered technology and focus on deploying your business, not infrastructure.

This guide looks briefly at common questions asked about the platform and our recommendations on starting with the VDC platform to help you make the most use of the environment.

How many vCPUs do I need? What does GHz mean?

"vCPU" means a virtual CPU. As technology has improved over the years, chipset providers like Intel have been able to increase the performance and output a physical CPU can provide. Put simply, vCPUs represent a portion of the physical CPU's power to interpret and process information.

GHz represents the clock frequency or rate at which the CPU can interpret and process information. With the VDC platform, for each vCPU you allocate, this is equivalent to 2.6 GHz. This means 2 vCPU is equal to 5.2GHz potential available frequency and so on.

A minimum of 1 vCPU is typically required for all modern operating systems.

You may need additional vCPUs for CPU-intensive applications that:

• Process large amounts of information
• Encrypt or Decrypt data
• Compress or Decompress data
• Render images
• Compile software

What is the best RAM or Memory allocation for my needs?

Random Access Memory (RAM) is fast volatile temporary storage. Data that is needed by the operating system or in-use applications use parts of this memory cache and when not needed discards it for use by other applications.

A minimum of 2 GB RAM is typically required for all modern operating systems.

You may need additional RAM allocated for memory-intensive applications that:

• Use a graphical interface for their operating system (Windows Server Desktop Editions)
• Host a database
• Provide "desktop" applications, such as word, spreadsheet or presentation software
• Serve as a gateway or proxy, such as for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

How much storage do I need?

To calculate your minimum VDC storage requirement, you should add up the total RAM for each VM and add it to the total storage required for each VM.

For example, if you want to have 2x Virtual Machines.

VM 1

2 CPU
100GB Disk
32GB RAM

VM 2

4 CPU
200GB Disk
64 GB RAM

To support the above VMs, you will need to order at least 396 GB of storage for your VDC ( this is from VM1 100GB DISK + VM1 32 GB RAM + VM2 200 GB + VM2 64 GB RAM ).

What do Storage "tiers" mean? What are IOPS?

Storage tiers are defined policies that administratively define different criteria. With our Virtual Data Centre platform, we provide a number of tiers with the differences being the number of IOPS available.

Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) is a widely adopted performance measurement that allows you to get an idea of the potential performance you may be able to achieve with read or write operations on your VMs. We have three defined "tiers":

• Tier 0 (Blaze): Up to 25,000 IOPS, per VM. Important for high-performing workloads including database servers.
• Tier 1 (Hot): Up to 5000 IOPS, per VM. Perfect for most workloads including website or application servers.
• Tier 2 (Warm): Up to 250 IOPS, per VM. Ideal for file storage servers, or testing/staging environments.

You can choose different amounts of tiers based on your needs.

Example:

You want to deploy a production application that utilises a database server. Your software provider has indicated they need separate disks for optimum performance and would like:

A 200 GB high-performing disk for the production workload. (Tier 0)

A 100 GB disk for database logs. It doesn't need to be as fast as the database but still needs to keep up as it rotates data frequently. (Tier 1)

A large 500 GB disk for long-term database dump archives and configuration backups. (Tier 2)

What sort of Network can I have with VDC? How many IP addresses do I get?

As a part of your VDC platform, we provide either a 1Gbps Throughput or 10Gbps Throughput Dual-Zone, Highly Available Firewall appliance. You have control over this firewall to make changes to firewall rules, NAT, IPSec tunnels and much more. The benefit of the platform is you can choose to operate multiple "tenant" networks within your virtual data centre, allowing you to create entirely new network segments as you see fit. Need to deploy a 192.168.0.0/24 and 10.1.1.0/24 network? No worries!

We always provide to you a minimum of one Public IPv4 address. This comes included with the firewall, and you can utilise Network Address Translation (NAT) to make the most use of this IP. If you'd like to purchase additional IPs, you can request for however many IPs you need. These will be added to the firewall and will be ready for your use once the platform is deployed. You can increase your available IPs at any time via the MySAU portal.

How does licensing work?

Licensing primarily covers the use of Windows-based Virtual Machines. If you intend to deploy Windows operating systems, such as Windows Server 2016 or 2019, you must purchase sufficient licensing to cover the amount of VMs you chose to deploy.

What backups can I get? How much do backups cost?

We provide access to an optional service of VM-level backups through Veeam. Veeam is a powerful enterprise tool that allows you to self-service your backups, including defining your preference for backup frequency and retention.

Veeam backup pricing consists of a mandatory Veeam licensing price (per VM) + the total amount of backup space you utilise.

Would you like to know more?

If you still need assistance deciding if VDC is the best option for you, contact our Solutions team on 1300 788 862, Option 1.