The following are examples of the questions that should be asked in order to determine the business requirements that will influence the design:

• What are the business initiatives, challenges, and goals?
• Are there Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in place? What are they?
• What are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements?
• Are there any compliance requirements?
• Who are the SMEs associated with the project?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• Who are the decision makers?
• Are there deadlines that the project must meet?
• Is there a budget for the project? What is the budget for the project?

The following are examples of the questions that should be asked in order to determine the technical requirements that will influence the design:

• Are there any current issues or technical pain points within the environment?
• What are the technology initiatives, challenges, and goals?
• How many servers will be virtualized as part of this project?
• Is there a preferred vendor for the server, network, or storage?
• Have any servers already been virtualized? What hypervisor is being used to host the already-virtualized servers?
• What type of growth is expected over the next three-five years?
• What Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) are in place?
• Is there a current network, system, storage, and application documentation?