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Hosting requirements worksheet for multi-tenant estates

Results

Use this worksheet to capture, on paper or in a document, what your hosting platform has to provide and what each supplier actually answered. It pairs with the requirements planner, which produces a written profile from your answers. Nothing here asks for prices or capacity from this site: those come from your suppliers in writing.

1. Estate profile

ItemYour answerNotes
Number of client tenants now, and expected in 24 monthsInclude acquisitions you are considering
Workload classes hostedFile and print, identity, line-of-business, databases, hosted desktops, web, your own tooling
Tenants with regulatory or contractual requirementsWhich ones, and what they require
Data residency constraintsWhich tenants, which locations
Support hours you promiseBusiness, extended or around the clock
Who operates whatYou, the supplier, or shared, per layer

2. Recovery tiers

Record objectives per workload class, not per tenant. Take the figures from the client’s business need, not from what a tool offers.

TierWorkloadsRecovery point (data loss tolerated)Recovery time (outage tolerated)Mechanism
A
B
C
Management plane

3. Isolation decisions

Tenant or groupBoundary chosenReasonControls to verify
Shared pool, reserved resources, dedicated hosts, or dedicated clusterLimits, network instance, separate backup repository, separate credentials

4. Supplier answers

Mark each answer with its class: contractual, documented, claimed or demonstrated (see evaluating a hosting provider).

QuestionSupplierAnswerClassEvidence seen
Which layers are shared with other customers?
How are resources limited per tenant, and what can I see?
What capacity is held for host failure?
Where are backups, who can delete them, are they immutable?
What do recovery statements measure?
How do I leave, how fast, and at what cost?
Which independent reports exist, and can I read them?
How is administrative access controlled and logged?

5. Decisions and unknowns

Finish by listing what you decided and what remains unknown. An unknown commercial figure is a finding in its own right: write it down and ask for it in writing rather than estimating it.

Decision or unknownOwnerDue

For the reasoning behind each section, read multi-tenant isolation and backup and recovery.