The vSphere physical design process (shown in the following diagram) includes choosing and configuring the physical hardware required to support the storage, network, and compute requirements:

During the physical design process, the hardware and configuration choices should map to the logical design and satisfy the functional and nonfunctional design requirements.

A design architect should answer the following questions about each design decision:

There will often be more than one physical solution that will meet the design requirements.

This chapter contains recipes for verifying whether or not our hardware is supported by checking VMware's Hardware Compatibility List, the physical design of storage, network, and compute resources, creating a custom ESXi image, and best practices for BIOS settings on a server running...