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.

Your Design Report
You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the board of ACL Realty. Your design report should include:

1. A one page executive summary,
2. Your proposed virtual infrastructure design for the data centre. This is to include:
   1. Which virtual technology you recommend to be deployed, and
   2. 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:
   1. Data and configuration backup,
   2. 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 outcomes:

• 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.