The conceptual model in a VMware Cloud Foundation design

Objectives 1.2 and 3.2 ask you to build a conceptual model from business objectives and to recognise one when you see it.

The conceptual model shows what the solution must achieve and for whom: its main capabilities, its consumers, the qualities it must deliver and the boundaries set by constraints. It is technology-agnostic: no product, model, size or address appears. Its audience is the business sponsor and stakeholders, and its purpose is agreement on scope before design work starts. Every element traces to at least one requirement or constraint.

To create one from a set of business objectives:

1. List the objectives and the requirements derived from them, each with an ID.
2. Group the requirements into capability areas: consumption, compute, storage, networking, identity and security, operations, continuity.
3. Add the actors: who consumes the platform, who operates it, who audits it.
4. Annotate the quality targets in measurable terms (availability, recoverability and so on).
5. Draw the boundaries the constraints set: sites and regions, isolation zones, systems that must be reused.
6. Trace each element to its requirements and walk the stakeholders through it.

Take three objectives: deliver new services faster, keep trading if one metropolitan data centre is lost, and keep business units securely apart, plus two needs common to any platform: operational efficiency and security.

The design profile categories used by every VCF blueprint (consumption, physical site configuration, availability, isolation, recoverability, expansion) make a good checklist for the conceptual model, because most of their values describe outcomes: tolerating the failure of a single rack, tenant-to-tenant isolation, or recovery to a second site after a single site is lost. Comparing your conceptual model with the profiles narrows the blueprint choice. Consumption values that name products, such as VCF Automation, already belong to the logical design.

Common trap: Naming products or models in the conceptual model, such as “a vSAN stretched cluster across two sites” - that is a logical decision; the conceptual model says “workloads keep running if one data centre fails” and leaves the mechanism open.

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