Virtualization Assessment Part 1

About this assessment

These assessment tasks provide an opportunity to demonstrate the competencies covered in the Virtualization subject.

• You are allowed to refer to your text books, notes and the Internet during the Assessment.
• You are required to complete all the tasks with in the allowed time to be successful in this assessment
• The documentation and research work must be entirely your own.

Successful completion of this assessment contributes towards attaining competency in the following:

ICTSUS501 Implement server virtualisation for a sustainable ICT system
ICTNWK525 Configure an enterprise virtual computing environment
ICTNWK535 Install an enterprise virtual computing environment

ICTICT511 Match IT needs with the strategic direction of the enterprise

These assessment tasks provide an opportunity for you to demonstrate the competencies required to design, plan and deploy virtualization solutions.

Scenario

You are employed by Pacific IT Solutions, an IT services company providing systems integration and consultancy services. You have been appointed as an IT consultant for Online Travel Services (OTS) which is a client of Pacific IT Solutions.

Background

OTS is a national organisation within Australia with 7 retail and sales offices in Australian capital cities and a central office and Data Centre on the Gold Coast. In total OTS employs 120 people across the organisation with the majority of the staff provided with remote access through either a dial-up or a virtual private network (VPN) connection.

Business Profile

Global Travel Pty Ltd (The Company) is a leading provider of Travel services in the Asia Pacific region with headquarters in Singapore. The Company is the holding group for five smaller companies: OTS, Asia Hotel Services, APAC Flight Brokers, Asia Adventure Holidays and Happy Insurance. All of the companies owned by The Company focus on their individual target markets and employ several hundred staff. The Company is currently trying to reduce its costs and decrease the time it takes to break into new markets. OTS is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company.

The business was setup in 2001 by the General Manager and run from a small office on the Gold Coast until 2004, when the business was bought by OTS and expanded to have offices nationally. This offered the ability for OTS to expand from the online travel services to offer personalised service to clients through the regional offices. OTS targets the provision of specialist travel packages to high value clients, advertising the packages it offers through the website.

The business is currently highly successful, with a turnover in the last financial year of over $100 million and a profit of $6 million.

OTS does not currently have any virtualization technologies. OTS has obtained a feasibility report in relation to virtualizing their data centre and has decided to proceed with full virtualization.

You have been given the task of designing and deploying the solution. Your design and implementation plan must provide for the following:

1.Virtualization of all physical servers. This shall be achieved through physical to virtual conversion or some other form of migration.

2.High Availability for the entire environment

3.Automatic load balancing and resource distribution

4.Fault tolerance for selected mission critical servers

5.Elimination of single points of failure

The following is a description of the data centre servers:

OTS hosts the following core applications in its Data Centre

• Web Server – this hosts the OTS website through which customers can make and manage their travel bookings. Customers can book all their travel requirements through the Internet; this includes payments and making changes where necessary.

• Customer and Booking Database – this is a SQL database running on Windows 2012 and contains all the information on customers, including their personal details, credit card and payment details and the bookings they have made. OTS staff can access this information through an in-house developed client front end. The database size is 3TB and is growing at 500 GB per annum.

Task 2
Write a description of the solution you envisage.Assume that you have chosen VMware as the virtualization solution.You should include:

1.A description of the architecture

2.An explanation of how your solution will work – describe the environment

3.An explanation of how your solution meets the business requirements

4.A description of each component

5.The rational for any design decisions you made

Task 3

Compile an inventory of hardware and software components.

Task 4

Prepare a work breakdown of your deployment plan.

Task 5

Write a post deployment test plan.

Task 6

Create a drawing of the solution using Visio.Include all physical and virtual components

• Application and File Servers – All user files are stored on folders on the central file servers, access to these is managed using the AD access controls. These servers all operate on the Windows 2012 platform. There are 4 file servers each with 1.5 TB of storage capacity. 2 servers have 10% free space and 2 have 60% free space.

• Mail Servers -Email uses Exchange 2013 operating ona Windows 2012 platform with 1.5 TB of storage capacity.

• Active Directory – OTS operates a single domain for all users. All users authenticate to the domain and their access to systems, applications and folders is controlled through AD Groups. There are 2 domain controllers.

Availability Requirements

The Web and SQL servers have a 100% availability requirement.

All other servers have a 95% availability requirement

Additional information

All servers are attached to a Gigabit network.

All data is stored on directly attached storage devices.

During peak times the Web and SQL server use 100% of their network bandwidth.