Anybody with who is involved in datacenter designing has to use multiple tools everyday and most of the times these tools are very expensive and not very user friendly. While working for a low budget project, I came across number of tools provided by various vendors. These tools are awesome to work with and free of cost. Apart from that I would also share some design guides, which I personally found wonderful. So, lets get started with the guides first.
Everything which is considered while planning a datacenter like -
- Virtual Local Area Networks - VLANs - these are ways in which to create broadcast domains (subnets) across Cisco devices
- Virtual Storage Area Networks - VSANs - these are similar to VLANs except they provide logical structures to the storage area network
- Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) - these are logical routing tables that are created inside of Cisco routers
- Virtual Switching System (VSS) - this technology allows two physical Cisco 6500s to act as a single logical virtual switch
- Virtual Port Channel - this combines two Nexus 7000 series switches or two Nexus 5000 series switches with 10 GE links. These devices are then represented to other switches as a single logical switch for port channeling purposes. Similar to EtherChannel, this tricks Spanning Tree into thinking the topology is loop free, even though we have the redundant paths.
This guide here from cisco is the best I had ever came across -
http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns107/c649/ccmigration_09186a008073377d.pdf
This is a complete guide - right from networks to virtualization, from Data center to Disaster Recovery. This is a must read for anybody planning a career in datacenter designing.
And now beleive it or not but Sun Microsystems has a very strong hold in the data center market and here is the link to their Data center Design Guide
APC is leader in Data center power and cooling solutions. APC provides free access to pandora's box of its tool to calculate power and cooling requirements, Carbon credits, Savings on moving from Physical Servers to Virtualized servers and many such more tools. APC call them the "Trade Off Tools and you can get them right here -
http://www.apc.com/prod_docs/results.cfm?DocType=Trade-Off%20Tool&Query_Type=10
Also, dont forget to have a look at their white paper.
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