Research Project - Design

Task

Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services.

Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data centre at its main site in Bathurst where the company's servers and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure:

• 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD);
• 3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array);
• 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);
• 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).

The management of the company is concerned about the increasing costs of power and cooling to operate their data centre. The management also wants to increase the reliability of the services, reduce their desktop support loads and accelerate desktop provisioning to the staff. They are also investigating whether they should employ a virtualisation technology in their data centre to enhance data centre efficiency while keeping costs low. They are considering whether they should also use virtualisation to provide an updated desktop environment to their staff.

Your Report -

You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the board of Regional Gardens. Your report should include:

1. A one page executive summary,

2. Your proposed virtual infrastructure for the data centre. This is to include:

• Which virtual technology you recommend to be deployed, and
• Your reasons for that recommendation.

3. An analysis of how virtual applications and desktops, or both, will be delivered to the user's desktops using the new infrastructure.

4. Your designs for:

• Data and configuration backup, and
• Disaster recovery.

5. Any Information Security changes required and the steps required to implement/monitor these changes.

Rationale -

This assessment item is designed to assess the understanding and use of some advanced topics in virtualisation, analytical skills, planning and design capabilities of students under some predefined requirements. In particular, the assessment covers the following learning objectives:

• be able to communicate the importance of different virtualisation technologies for x86 and Unix based systems;
• be able to evaluate which virtualisation technology should be used in a given set of requirements; be able to identify and evaluate the requirements to create a virtual infrastructure; and
• be able to analyse the requirements for management of a virtual infrastructure.