Common VCDX Mistakes: What SLA?

Continuing on from yesterday’s post: Common VCDX Mistakes: A02: Enough bandwidth between Datacenters I have another common VCDX mistake for you.

What SLA?

Being able to understand Service Level Agreements (SLA) and how they affect the design of an environment is an extremely important quality that we look for in a VCDX candidate. It is very difficult for VCDX panellists to be able to judge a candidate’s competency if the design they are defending does not document any SLA’s. With that said, I also acknowledge that not all customers actually have SLA requirements. In fact, the design I defended for my VCDX-DCV defence did not have any SLA requirements.

So if, like me, you are in that situation where a customer didn’t specify any SLA’s, the first thing you should try and do is help the customer define them. If that isn’t possible for whatever reason, the next thing you should try and do is understand what SLA’s your design could meet and how. Could your design meet a 99.99% Availability SLA? If so, how? What RTO/RPO does the design offer the customer?

So when, during the defense, we ask “What was the Availability SLA for this design?” you can respond with “The customer didn’t actually have any SLA requirements. However, I believe this design could meet an <inset SLA here> SLA and this is how it can meet that…….”.

This way, the panellists can get a clearer picture of your proficiency in this area.

As usual, these are my own thoughts, and may not be shared by other VCDX panellists. If you are interested in my thoughts, you can either subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter to keep an eye out for new posts.

Feel free to discuss in the comment section below.