The physical design details the logic design, where each major infrastructure component is already present, at a high level (with the right design decisions and motivations).
Hardware sizing, for both the capacity and the performance aspects, could be assisted by the initial assessment of existing infrastructure, as will be described in Chapter 3, Analysis and Assessment of Existing Environments.
In a Physical design, you start to build your exact solution. However, in comparison to logical design, at this stage you go much, and you are referring to specific technologies and components. The same approach as with logical design is used—first, there is a physical design overview, and then each significant component has its physical design section:
- Compute design
- Network design
- Storage design
- Backup and recovery design
- Disaster recovery design
- Security design
- Cloud automation design
- VDI design
The following is an example of the physical design of the ESXi hypervisor:
In the upcoming chapters, we will look at specific hardware and software components in more detail.