Virtualization Technology For Regional Gardens Ltd. Data Center

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.

Virtualization technology is related to creation of virtual version of something rather than actual. It is possible to create virtual version of operating system, server, and storage device or network resources. By doing this, resources of system are divided into one or more execution environments. Virtualization technique has become popular among people and it has associated with number of computing technologies that include server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and operating system–level virtualization and application virtualization. That is why most of the business organizations like Regional Garden wants to move towards usage of virtualization technology. Before start implementation of this technology in an organization, some important points are necessary to consider such as building of virtual environment, configuration of virtual environment, security of virtual environment, monitoring and population of virtual environment, backup virtual environment and troubleshooting of virtual environment. After this basic discussion about virtualization technology, now in next segment we will emphasize on design of virtualization technology that will be suitable for Regional Garden Ltd. (Webopedia.com, 2017).

As per the given information about data center of Regional Garden Ltd., it is a small data center at main site of Bathurst and at this site server and data storage of company is located. Before decide that which virtual technology should be deployed in company, it will be better to know about server infrastructure of company. Regional Garden Company has two active directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2 with specifications (8GB RAM, 140GB HDD and 2Xeon 3.6GHz), three SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 with specifications (4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array, 2xXeon 2.8GHz), an Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 with specifications (8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array and 2xXeon 2.8 GHz) and 4 Windows Server 2003 File and Print Servers and 2 Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and Tomcat. The server infrastructure is powerful and secured for data center of Regional Garden Ltd. But still management of company is concerned about the increment in cost of power and cooling for operating data center. That is why company wants to move towards virtualization technology.

On the behalf of above information about data center of Regional Garden Ltd. we recommend to deploy VMware type of virtualization technology. There is no data center available in world that does not use VMware. This type of virtualization controls the server virtualization market. The two main commercial products of VMware are VMware and vSphere. Besides these two products, this virtualization also dominates the desktop level virtualization market and free server virtualization market by using VMWare Server product. It is one of most popular virtualization techniques such as Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat, Oracle and Amazon. There are various reasons to recommend VMware to Regional Garden Ltd. that we will discuss in this report (Virtualization Review, 2017).

Virtualization and its types have capability to improve on-premise data center and also provide various thoughtful changes to the data centers. Due to following reasons or benefits of VMware Virtualization Technology, we would like Regional Gardens Ltd. should implement this for advancement of data center.

1. Less Heat Buildup
2. Reduced Cost
3. Faster Redeploy
4. Easier Backups
5. Better Testing

Proposed Virtual Infrastructure for the Data Center

Lots of money in form of millions of dollars have spent on research and design of heat indulgence and control in the data center. But still there is problem in servers of data centers to produce heat. In this case, virtualization is the solution in a way that it virtues servers and less physical hardware are required to use. As much as less physical hardware will be used, less heat will be produced. In this way cooling will be increased in data center of Regional Gardens Ltd. and main issue will be resolved (TechRepublic, 2017).

The main reason of high cost in a data center is its hardware. The reduction in usage of hardware in data center, cost will automatically be reduced. By doing this, easier maintenance and less use of electricity will be possible. This will lead to significant savings of cost (SearchServerVirtualization, 2017).

In case of death of physical server, redeployment of physical server consists of various factors such as backup server should be ready, image of server should be ready and data on backup server is current or not. But by implement VMWare Virtualization Type, redeployment can be done within minutes. The snapshots of virtual machines can be enabled with just a few clicks.

Through VMware virtualization, both backups and snapshots of virtual machines can be taken. The virtual machines can be moved to different servers and redeployed easier becomes easier and faster (Serverwatch.com, 2017).

This is most significant feature of VMware Virtualization. Due to this feature, if user does any mistake then whole data will not be lost. By just reverting to the previous snapshot, we can move forward and no problem will occur. This testing environment can isolate from end users while keeping them online (SearchServerVirtualization, 2017).

These are some essential reasons to select VMware Virtualization for Regional Gardens Ltd. Company. As we can see that the solutions of most of the problems of Regional Gardens Company is VMWare Virtualization.

As we have selected to use VMware Virtualization technology for data center of Regional Gardens Ltd., so this technology has potential to provide both virtual and desktop applications to users’ desktop. The most popular virtual application that has developed by VMware and will be delivered to users’ desktop is ThinApp. VMware ThinApp is an application virtualization solution which is able to execute applications without installing them in conventional way by virtualizing resources such as environment variables, Windows Registry Keys and Files. The virtual environment provides a merged view to the client underlying of physical and virtual resources (Vmware.com, 2017). By using ThinApp virtual environment of VMWare, the users of data centers can do OS migration, Application Isolation, Server Consolidation and Desktop Security. In this way, on users’ desktop this virtual application of VMware will be delivered. The main features of VMware applications are OS migration, mobile access and no application silos (Technet.microsoft.com, 2017).

As we have decided to use VMWare Virtualization technology for Regional Gardens Ltd. data center (Petri, 2017). Then the backup and recovery design will also be handled by VMWare. The backup and disaster recovery will be controlled by VMware Virtual Machines. The basic principle of data recovery and backup by using virtualization technology is to use Vsphere Client Data Recovery plug-ins that are helpful to configure the Data Recovery Virtual Machine and this will further take care of jobs of backup and recovery. Virtual Machine of VMWare has potential to recover data and to take backup up to eight VMs concurrently. Following is the design that shows backup and disaster recovery by (VMware Pubs.vmware.com, 2017).

                                                                      Figure: Backup and Disaster Recovery

The security features that are used by data center of Regional Gardens Ltd. are not so appropriate and reliable. As it is decided to use new technology in company for improving data center, so we would recommend to use advanced security tools. The advanced security tools can be use of advanced cryptography techniques, anti-viruses, firewalls and updated security patches. These will protect server infrastructure of data center from vulnerable cyber-attacks such as Denial of Service Attack, Malware, Ransomeware etc.

To implement these changes, security professionals of company just need to install anti-virus into systems of data center, switch firewall to on mode and at programming level cryptography should be used for data encryption.

Conclusion 

After this whole discussion we can say that virtualization has multiple users worldwide and due to its features and effectiveness, users are increasing continuously. Therefore, it will be a best technology for Regional Gardens Ltd. for its data center improvement and advancement. But there is only need to be careful about security and privacy of server and other computer systems. Above discussed security changes will be helpful to sustain security of data center.

References 

Pubs.vmware.com. (2017). vSphere Documentation Center. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.datarecovery.admin.doc_20%2FGUID-C7E5E59B-DA69-4CBD-8B6A-E295FA3FDEB6.html

Petri.(2017). VMware Data Recovery - How to Backup & Restore Your VM. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://www.petri.com/vmware-data-recovery-backup-and-restore 

Technet.microsoft.com. (2017). Back up and restore VMware. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt742099(v=sc.12).aspx 

Vmware.com. (2017). ThinApp Agentless Application Virtualization: VMware. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://www.vmware.com/in/products/thinapp.html 

TechRepublic. (2017). 10 benefits of virtualization in the data center - TechRepublic. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-benefits-of-virtualization-in-the-data-center/  

Virtualization Review. (2017). Top 10 Benefits of Server Virtualization -- Virtualization Review. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2011/06/20/top-10-benefits-of-server-virtualization.aspx 

SearchServerVirtualization.(2017). Top 5 benefits of server virtualization technology. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Top-five-benefits-of-server-virtualization 

Serverwatch.com. (2017). Top 10 Virtualization Technology Companies for 2016. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://www.serverwatch.com/server-trends/slideshows/top-10-virtualization-technology-companies-for-2016.html 

SearchServerVirtualization. (2017). Virtualization implementation: Nine steps to success. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/Virtualization-implementation-Nine-steps-to-success 

Webopedia.com. (2017). What is Virtualization? Webopedia Definition. Retrieved 17 May 2017, from https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/V/virtualization.html