Sometimes, you have to find a simple and effective way to analyze an existing environment; this task could become a crucial aspect of your system that must be properly planned and executed.

These are some situations in which you may need to analyze an existing environment:

• Before planning a virtualization project: Before starting on your virtualization journey, it is important to really understand your current IT infrastructure and how it will be impacted by the virtualization process; this is not only to clarify whether virtualization is possible but also to match or better transform the existing procedures in the new environment.
• Before a migration: It doesn't matter whether we are talking about an entire platform migration, a migration from one hypervisor to another, or simply a migration across vSphere (maybe different versions, in the case of a hardware refresh, or sometimes also across the same version); performing this task without good sizing and planning of the target could be really business-critical.
• Before an upgrade: In the case of an in-place upgrade, usually, the system is already sized. However, some minor considerations could be taken into account, such as different overheads—for example, for virtual appliances or ESXi itself. Note that upgrades require more attention and considerations, and we will cover those aspects in Chapter 11, Lifecycle Management, Patching, and Upgrade. Also, an upgrade that is not in-place just falls into the migration case.
• On a running system: Finding a baseline for your environment or simple document could be an important task, if it wasn't already covered during the deployment of the infrastructure. Also, it could be useful to prepare for other tasks.
• Before an audit process: Compliance, security, and regimentation are typical cases where you need a deep and targeted analysis of your environment, but there can be also other cases, such as a simple verification that the environment matches the business needs, or specific aspects such as performance.

Different types of analysis could be performed to achieve different goals, depending on the types of the previous cases:

• Discover and inventory: This is useful for capturing your assets, in order to build your documents or check the inventory. Usually, you need some detailed information from your hardware, such as firmware releases or simply the exact names and models for a device or I/O card.
• Solution readiness: Normally, this is related to a new virtualization project where you need to verify the effective possibility to virtualize your workloads. However, it could be useful also in any upgrade process, or in every migration, such as from a different type of hypervisor.
• Health check or sanity check or configuration audit: Doing a health assessment of your environment is critical in several situations, such as any migration or upgrade process. However, it could also be very useful to perform it periodically to discover wasted resources, misalignment with the documentation or with best practices from VMware or other vendors, and possible optimization or changes.
• Risks and compliance assessment or audit: This is useful when your focus is on the security or compliance aspects. Licensing validation could also fit in this case.
• Capacity planning: This is usually used to find out whether capacity meets the business requirements.
• Optimization assessment: Measuring your current performance is necessary so that you can get a good idea of how your current environment is performing. By doing this, you can ensure that you properly size your virtual hardware and can avoid any bottlenecks on your ESXi hosts. Doing this before you start your project is important so that you do not run into any surprises that can cause problems during your deployment phase.

There are also other types of analysis that could be related to the rest of the infrastructure, such as storage or network parts, that sometimes must be performed in more depth and need to be specific to the vendor, products, and solutions used. Some other analysis could be needed for other layers, such as the application layer, the database level, the network and storage level, the application architecture, and so on.

This chapter will explain how to perform the following:

• Analyze a physical environment before virtualizing it
• Assess an existing virtual environment