Virtualisation Report- A Case Study of ACL Reality

Question

Overview: This assessment item requires you to produce a short report by investigating and advising a company on some key topics and aspects of the use of virtualisation technologies.

Note: answering these questions will help you build a solid base for your next assessment item. You must also provide references in your report using the APA 6th edition style of referencing. A guide to the use of APA referencing can be found in the Interact Resources section.

Task
ACL Realty is a large real estate firm. Their core competence is their understanding of the real estate market, and their understanding of their customers and the customer needs. ACL Realty current self-managed a small data centre that has the following servers:

• 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD). These servers are used for authentication and authorisation;
• 3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 500GB RAID-5 array). These servers are used for database operations for Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and their Client Property application;
• 1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 4 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 1 x SharePoint 2007 server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 16GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 1 x RENet Client Property and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).

The board of ACL Realty knows that their core competency is their understanding of the real estate market in their area of operations, and their understanding of their customers and their needs. They have been advised to retire most of their old physical servers and start moving their operations onto a virtual platform. You have been employed to advise the board on various aspects of virtualisation.

The board wants a report from you that answers the following questions:

1. Explain the role that Virtualisation plays in the current data centre environment. You must research and explain:
   1. How will virtualisation assist ACL Realty to improve operations in their Data Centre? Provide supporting references for your report.
   2. What are the minimum requirements that ACL Realty will need to consider before starting to implement a virtualisation solution in their data centre? Provide supporting references for your report.
   3. Provide one relevant example of an organisation using these technologies.
   4. Your answer for this section should be between 400 – 500 words and address the points in the marking rubric.
2. You have to explain what you consider to be the key attributes of a VM so that it can be considered efficient.
   1. What are some of the key attributes of a VM to be considered an efficient VM. Provide supporting references for your report.
   2. What important points will you consider when using a VM as a server? Why do you consider these important? Provide supporting references for your report.
   3. Your answer for this section should be between 400 – 500 words and address the points in the marking rubric.
3. A virtual appliance is a key concept in the virtualisation world. There are currently many hundreds (probably thousands) of virtual appliances available for use.
   1. Discuss the differences between a virtual appliance and a vApp? Provide supporting references for your report.
   2. ACL Realty has been offered the chance to upgrade their RENet Client Property and CRM application to a Virtual Appliance. Would you recommend this approach to ACL Realty? Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach. Provide supporting references for your report.
   3. Your answer for this section should be between 400 – 500 words and address the points in the marking rubric.

Answer

1. Explanation on the role of Virtualisation in Current Data Centre
1.a) Explanation of Virtualisation assistant to improve operation of ACL Realty’s Data Centre:
Han, Gopalakrishnan and Lee (2015) opined that virtualisation is the most important application that fundamentally changed the way of computing. Through the following way, virtualisation will help to improve the operation in data centre for ACL Realty –

Save Energy: Server farms eat up a great deal of energy and make huge warmth development. Virtualising the server’s decreases the measure of equipment required which at that point makes less warmth. It additionally strengthens less power utilization, making the inside more vitality proficient, as indicated by InfoWorld (Pierson & Hlavacs, 2015). This will likewise bring down utility expenses and be a stage toward better natural practices.

Improving Disaster Recovery: Server farms can run finish reinforcements for the servers or take previews to better get ready for potential fiasco occasions. This likewise makes it simpler to fortify the information as the servers can take depictions for the duration of the day to guarantee a la mode data is continued, as per TechRepublic.

Pushing to the Cloud: The cloud has just helped various associations and can likewise help store information. The inside could house an effective foundation used to get to virtual machines and will make cloud relocation more practical for the server farm (Saridis et al. 2016). Cloud conditions could influence the virtualization to process more effective and open up different open doors for the innovation inside the middle.

1.b) Minimum Requirements need to Consider ACL Realty to Implement a Virtualisation Solution in their Data Centre
Virtualization is the establishment of cloud computing. It empowers formation of a savvy layer of deliberation to shroud the complexities of the product or equipment that is fundamental underneath the layer. ACL Reality can list a plenty of stages, for example, VMWare that are related with an innovation to arrangement a private cloud and furthermore to go about as a relationship between private cloud and outside cloud (Jyothi, Dong & Godfrey, 2015). It is to acknowledged that three indispensable characteristics for making a private cloud, for example, administration of administration level approaches, cloud working framework and virtualization. Virtualization isolates the backend level and client level for formation of a consistent domain between the two (Bittencourt et al. 2015). Following requirements need to consider to start implementing the virtualisation in data centre of ACL Realty –

• Memory
• Storage
• Processors
• Network Adopters

1.c) Example of an Organisation using Virtualisation Technologies
Hinsdale Township High School District 86 in Hinsdale, Ill., confronted tremendous spending weight, as each other city assemble the country over. In any case, its specific test was that the money saving advantage of the area's equipment invigorate was not convincing (Bhattacharya & JILANI, 2015). According to the management of the organisation, they spent huge money for maintenance of their server in every three years. Therefore, they turned into virtualization to broaden the area's invigorate cycle while enhancing workload adaptability, stack adjusting and accessibility. In spite of the fact that accessibility may appear like a difficult thought for a genuinely little shop, the need to help an expansive client base of 500 staff individuals and 4,500 understudies was an imperative issue - particularly for the area's virtual Exchange 2010 Server stage.

2. Explanation of the key attributes for an efficient VM at ACL Realty
2.a) Description of the Key attributes of VM that needed to be considered as an efficient VM
Penetration of server virtualisation in modern days is undeniable for every organisation. He et al. (2016) stated that virtualization hit 50% infiltration and refers to the virtualization advertise as "saturated." Gartner's gauge may even be low as other seller particular investigations have discovered that at least 80% of ventures as of now utilize virtualization somehow. Following key attribute that must to consider for an efficient VM for ACL Realty –

Certified VMware: The quick rates of reception and change in virtualized conditions put included requests the reinforcement programming to legitimately ensure it. VMware vSphere incorporates the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (alluded to as VADP) that quickens and disentangles VM assurance (Bittencourt et al. 2015).

Installation and Configuration: IT heads are relied upon to oversee more VMs while fusing reinforcement administration into their everyday obligations. This puts the onus on reinforcement programming to adjust to meet this new corporate reality. To achieve this, reconciliation with accessible APIs in VMware vSphere and vCenter Server and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) are essentials (Shabeera & Madhu Kumar, 2015). VMware coordination is required for the computerized disclosure and administration of VMs while bolster for Microsoft VSS is expected to guarantee the making of use steady reinforcements when depictions are taken of the visitor VMs.

Application Aware: The need to make application reliable reinforcements turns out to be more intense which changes the part of reinforcement operators (Guan, Choi & Song, 2015). These operators must encourage preparing the application so an application reliable reinforcement might be finished on a VM amid a preview.

Efficiency and Scalability: Reinforcement programming needs to develop so IT overseers might be more productive in these new parts (Luo et al. 2014). This requires reinforcement programming total the administration and detailing of reinforcement occupations on a focal comfort to which this single group approaches.

Affordability: One would believe that reinforcement programming suppliers would get a handle on that organizations need to pay less not more for reinforcement programming to secure their VMs after simply bringing down their foundation costs.

2.b) Important Point that Need to consider when using VM as a server
When ACL realty use VM as a server, following important points should consider –

Capacity Planning: Keeping up adequate limit and getting ready for future development is a relentless activity in a virtual condition (Lee, Hancock & Hu, 2014). Comprehending what assets to include when they are required guarantees that you generally have enough limits and are additionally not unnecessarily squandering cash on assets that you needn't bother with.

Performance Management: Having great execution is basic in a virtual domain where similar assets are being shared by numerous virtual machines (Bittencourt et al. 2015). Nothing can execute a virtual situation quicker than not having sufficient execution for all the virtual machines running in it.

Identification of VM Sprawl: It's not generally simple to spot VM Sprawl, particularly when you deal with your virtual condition on an everyday premise where development after some time may not be effortlessly perceptible.

Identification of Storage I/O Bottleneck: Having a capacity I/O bottleneck is maybe one of the greatest dangers to execution in a virtual situation and furthermore one of the all the more difficult issues to distinguish and resolve. Bottlenecks can occur as the after-effect of numerous things from basic arrangement settings to uncalled for engineering outlines.

3. Key Concept of Virtualisation World
3.a) Discussion on the Difference Between Virtual Appliance and vApp
Jyothi, Dong and Godfrey (2015) stated that both the virtual appliance and vApp is containing one or more VMs. The main difference between virtual appliance and vApp is vApp can run only in hypervisor environment whereas the virtual appliance can run on hosted environment. Pierson and Hlavacs (2015) opined that virtual appliance is delivering prebuilt unit but vApp is more VMware specific and work with encapsulated vApp pool (Lee, Hancock & Hu, 2014). AN virtual appliance can use in ESX, player, workstation built vApp can only use in vSphere environment along with DRS enabled.

3.b) Advantage and Disadvantage of upgrading RENet Client Property and CRM application to a Virtual Appliance for ACL Realty
RENet Client Property and CRM Application of ACL Realty has huge impact on their business revenue. Therefore, upgrading to virtual appliance for their CRM application and RENet will allow in real time data access to the user that can improve in making better customer relationship and loyalty. Upgrading to virtual appliance of their business server, ACL Realty can assess the following benefits –

Use of Resources in efficient Manner: Currently, ACL Realty is utilizing 25% capacity of their physical servers. Therefore, the memory and processing power is wasting in their physical servers. Upgrading to virtual, the company can able to host one physical server into multiple virtual servers.

Disaster Recovery: There is always a high chance of data lost in physical server because there is no proper backup process within the setup server of ACL Realty. Virtual appliance allows user in creating never destroyed backup facility with much faster and easier in terms of restoring data.

Security: Security is brought together through the hypervisor programming; rather than securing every one of your individual servers, you simply need to center around building legitimate shields and controls into your fundamental programming.

Scalability: Rather than having to buy new hardware every time you need a new server, you’ll be able to “spin up” a new server in far less time.

There will be some challenges that can face by ACL Realty when they upgrade their server to virtual appliance such as –

Failure Single Point: Virtual servers require appropriate arranging in advance; on the off chance that you don't have the correct repetition set up, having the greater part of company’s servers running off of one host implies that on the off chance that you lose that one server, everything is gone (Lee, Hancock & Hu, 2014). ACL Realty can alleviate this hazard by having numerous hosts and a SAN on which you can move down your information, however this will be an extra speculation for the company.

Requisite Skill set: A virtual domain is more unpredictable than a physical situation. This implies if your IT group doesn't have the correct range of abilities, you could be stuck in an unfortunate situation.

References
Akyildiz, I. F., Lin, S. C., & Wang, P. (2015). Wireless software-defined networks (W-SDNs) and network function virtualization (NFV) for 5G cellular systems: An overview and qualitative evaluation. Computer Networks, 93, 66-79.

Bhattacharya, S., & JILANI, J. H. A. K. (2015). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/151,024.

Bittencourt, L. F., Lopes, M. M., Petri, I., & Rana, O. F. (2015, November). Towards virtual machine migration in fog computing. In P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC), 2015 10th International Conference on(pp. 1-8). IEEE.

Guan, X., Choi, B. Y., & Song, S. (2015). Energy efficient virtual network embedding for green data centers using data center topology and future migration. Computer Communications, 69, 50-59.

Han, B., Gopalakrishnan, V., Ji, L., & Lee, S. (2015). Network function virtualization: Challenges and opportunities for innovations. IEEE Communications Magazine, 53(2), 90-97.

Happiest Minds, (2018). Moving Towards a Virtual Data Center. Accessed on 12th April, 2018 from: https://www.happiestminds.com/whitepapers/Moving-Towards-a-Virtual-Data-Center.pdf

He, K., Rozner, E., Agarwal, K., Gu, Y. J., Felter, W., Carter, J., & Akella, A. (2016, August). AC/DC TCP: Virtual congestion control enforcement for datacenter networks. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference (pp. 244-257). ACM.

Jyothi, S. A., Dong, M., & Godfrey, P. (2015, June). Towards a flexible data center fabric with source routing. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on Software Defined Networking Research (p. 10). ACM.

Lee, J. H., Hancock, M. G., & Hu, M. C. (2014). Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 80-99.

Luo, G., Qian, Z., Dong, M., Ota, K., & Lu, S. (2014, August). Network-aware re-scheduling: Towards improving network performance of virtual machines in a data center. In International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (pp. 255-269). Springer, Cham.

Pierson, J. M., & Hlavacs, H. (2015). Introduction to Energy Efficiency in Large?Scale Distributed Systems. Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Energy Efficiency: A Holistic View, 1-16.

Saridis, G. M., Peng, S., Yan, Y., Aguado, A., Guo, B., Arslan, M., ... & Spadaro, S. (2016). Lightness: A function-virtualizable software defined data center network with all-optical circuit/packet switching. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 34(7), 1618-1627.

Shabeera, T. P., & Madhu Kumar, S. D. (2015). Optimising virtual machine allocation in MapReduce cloud for improved data locality. International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2(1), 2-8.