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Unit 2 – Discussion Board (75 points)
Due: Thu, Sep 7 |Printer Friendly Version
Description
Primary Discussion Response is due by Thursday (11:59:59pm Central), Peer Responses are due by Saturday (11:59:59pm Central).
Primary Task Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 400–600 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.
This Discussion Board assignment will have 3 parts that are all related to justifying virtualization to your management. They are as follows:
1. Download a virtual workstation. Showing management an actual demonstration is helpful in making a case for virtualization.
2. Read a story from an expert who has experience with virtualization.
3. Research and provide a written recommendation for virtualization. This will be shared with your classmates in a discussion.
Download a Virtual Workstation
To convince management that virtualization provides efficiencies for the corporation, you need to demonstrate what virtualization is. A very effective manner is to demonstrate how virtualization works, such as showing a host machine with a virtual machine using a different operating system.
For the first part of the Discussion Board assignment, you are to download the virtual workstation from
this Web site
.
The site may require you to sign in. The download is an evaluation copy. Provide a screen capture of the virtual workstation after installation
Story
A few years ago, I worked as a configuration manager for a geographic information systems (GIS) company that had offices in Denver, Calgary, Ottawa, Munich, Prague, and Jakarta. The company had five aircraft that were equipped with systems developed internally, including radar and acquisition software. The radar system was developed in Munich, software development was done in Calgary and Denver, and editing was done in Ottawa and Jakarta. We did not have a disaster recovery plan in place, and the development team stored their source code in a server in Calgary. As a configuration manager, I expressed concern that we did not have a way to recover from disaster, but there was never money to implement a proper disaster recovery plan.
A few months went by, and one day, we got a frantic call from the lead developer in Calgary. Their source control server crashed, and they needed a replacement quickly. We did not have a replacement server, so we had to order it from our preferred vendor. When the server came to the Denver office, it was configured with the proper patches for the operating system, and the server was shipped to Calgary. The Calgary office installed the source control application and restored the last known database image. By the time the server was ready for production, three weeks had passed. Meanwhile, the developers were making changes to code without saving it first. The merging of code took another week.
As it typically happens in industry, after a disaster, upper management finds funds to fix the issue. I got a modest $1,500 budget to do whatever I could to implement a disaster recovery plan for source code. I proposed to migrate the source code repository to Denver. I then purchased an old Xenon server for $1,000 and was able to obtain 64 gigabytes (GB) of random access memory (RAM) from our information technology (IT) team. They had a few memory chips laying around, unused. I purchased four 1 terabyte (TB) external drives for the machine and installed VMWare (we had a license that was no longer used). I created four virtual machines in that server, allocating 8 GB of RAM to each virtual machine, and 300GB of external space for each. One of the virtual machines was configured just like the Calgary server, using a Linux operating system. We changed the process so that the developers checked in their code in the virtual machine in Denver. Every night, the virtual machine environment was copied to Calgary and Ottawa. A host machine was created in servers in Calgary and Ottawa to serve as secondary servers in case the main server crashed. The disaster recovery plan was designed to be able to boot up a virtual machine in any of the three locations (Denver, Calgary, or Ottawa) in case of a problem affecting the server in these offices. We ran a test and were able to restore functionality after 20 minutes of losing a server in an office. The other virtual machines in Denver were used to create the application build, to test the installation, and to create automation test scripts. The project was a success, and we were able to demonstrate how we could improve our process with limited funds.
Moral
Demonstrating how virtual machines can provide flexibility and disaster recovery capabilities will change the executive team’s initial resistance to migrate to a virtual environment.
Discussion
Investigate the library and Internet for information about virtual technologies for data center virtualization, data management, and virtual storage.
Complete the following for this assignment:
· Based on your research, provide a recommendation for a proposed target platform for a typical host machine, including the number of central processing units (CPUs), the amount of memory, the number of network interface cards, and the amount of local storage required.
· Based on your research of reported virtualization metrics, provide a rough estimate of the number of physical machines that can be virtualized in a host machine for a typical data center environment
· Justify your selection by identifying the problems that these methods will solve and the benefits that will be achieved by using these methods.
Prepare a Word document that includes screenshots of your virtual machine running under the host environment, and attach them to your Discussion Board post.
Responses to Other Students: Respond to at least 2 of your fellow classmates with at least a 200-word reply about their Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening. To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:
· What did you learn from your classmate’s posting? What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?
· What clarification do you need regarding the posting?
· What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates’ postings?
For assistance with your assignment, please use your textbook and all course resources.
Discussion Board Rubric
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Expectation
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Points Possible
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Points Earned
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Comments
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Application of Learning Material Content: Post demonstrates understanding of Learning Material content.
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25
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Application of Course Knowledge: Post contributes unique perspectives or insights gleaned from text/learning resources, or specified by assignment.
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25
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DB Responses: Responds substantively to two posts. Responses encourage interaction in the Discussion Board and classroom community.
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10
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Organization: Post presents information logically and is clearly relevant to discussion topic.
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8
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Professional Language: Posts contain accurate grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation with few or no errors.
Any resources should be cited in APA format or style specified in the assignment.
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7
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Total Points
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75
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Total Points Earned
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View a downloadable version of the
Discussion Board Grading Rubric
.
Reference
VMware. (n.d.).
Download VMware workstation.
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation/10_0
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