Migrating Servers to Virtual Machines - Research Proposal Example

? Capstone Project Proposal: Migrating Servers to Virtual Machines Degree Program: BS IT Mentor Signature Block Signature ____ Mentor’s Signature ____ Date: Table of Contents Capstone Proposal Summary Review of Other Work Rationale and Systems Analysis Goals and Objectives Project Deliverables Project Plan and Timelines………………………………………………………………… References Capstone Project Proposal: Migrating Servers to Virtual Machines Capstone Proposal Summary In the past decade, data in organizations has recorded a tremendous growth; where decision-making require information from different sources. Previously, data management and storage required tapes and files to keep. However, due to advancement of complexity in managing organizations, more data storage is required as well as its incorporation and easy access. This has led to the use of data management tools to ensure information is flowing in all directions. This requires using of multiple hardware systems to manage and store the information in an easy to retrieve way. Hence, virtual machines come in to provide saving of space used for multiple hardware and easy access to information since it can set up several servers on one hardware. Data management is an essential part of modern organization since they have to deal with huge loads of information. Thus moving of physical servers to virtual machines, virtualization has increased in the recent past since virtual machines help in managing data through shared hardware. It has become a mainstream operation in the organization due to its ability in, “helping provide consolidation savings, workload migration capabilities, reduced deployment times and a variety of other benefits,” (Schmidt & Rispoli, 2009, p. 42). The advantage of virtualization is that one can set up several servers on the same hardware box, rather than having to pay for many hardware servers. This has the benefit of saving costs of running multiple hardware servers such as power used when there are several servers, space for putting up the hardware as well as financial costs.   Recently, information has become the main tool for organization in competing, thus, management of information is most crucial. Sharing of information is yet another requirement in the organization. Thus, a tool that can help in sharing of information is welcome in organization. More so, cost saving is among the most emphasized issues in many organizations of the current times. Virtual machines provide these benefits, making it a key tool for organizations. Many organizations have realized this, and are virtualizing their physical servers to enjoy the differences. Review of Other Work     The number of organizations using virtual machines has grown tremendously in the recent past. Many of these organizations are virtualizing with an aim of achieving several goals that are reducing of costs of running physical servers, enhancing efficiency, achieving flexibility with information, and improving operations within the organization. Le Bourget Communaute provides a good illustration of virtualization at work. The company has virtualized its servers and desktops with vSphere virtualization from the VMware and the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch (Cisco, 2010). The company has all the efforts of 2500 employees supported by 1000 desktop computers that deliver quite a big range of services. Its PCs are located in various places such as city halls, self-service kiosks, libraries, schools and among other places for providing services to the public (Cisco, 2010). The company has good control of this infrastructure after it was able to virtualize. The company started the virtualization project in 2008, with an objective to save space. However, the company realized other benefits such as servers that were dedicated to specific tasks and the ability to clone servers for testing purposes. The company was able to virtualize 27 physical servers, and it is currently running 70 virtual servers. The company further made the decision to virtualize their 1000 desktop computers in the network. After the virtualization, the company has its desktops based on 16 blade servers hosted in ‘Drancy’ data centre. By focusing on machines that demand less use of automated office applications has reduced CPU load. The VMware is used to virtualize the applications, which reduces templates needed and utilizes only one Windows XP master. Through a linked clone deployment, storage is well under control since the only thing that needs saving on the disk is the differences between the virtual desktop computer and the template. Larose, the head of the IT infrastructure in Le Bourget Communaute says that 6TB SAN is enough for all their needs. He further said that a before virtualization, they could have needed more. Thus, virtualization has saved on storage materials needed (Cisco, 2010). Le Bourget Communaute head of IT Larose cites that he was able to save 20% of total costs in comparison to the costs of renewing hardware for the desktops. In addition, the company has achieved efficiency considering they are using a third of the time they used before virtualization to complete the same tasks. Further, the company has saved cost on electricity used for the desktops, managing to reduce consumption by 2.2 GW in the next coming three years (Cisco, 2010). Rationale and System Analysis Several reasons have led businesses to consider virtualization of their physical servers. It is obvious that any business will seek to remain very productive as well as competitive in its market at the minimum costs without foregoing any quality. Information technology management has recently risen in terms of costs, and any tool that can save costs without foregoing quality and efficiency would be very crucial. The first rationale of virtualization is saving costs that could have gone to purchase physical servers since virtualization allows sharing of one physical server by several virtual servers. Therefore, money that could have otherwise been used for purchasing physical servers is saved. This provides a competitive advantage of the organization's products since the cost of producing them will be reduced. Further, the fewer the physical servers in the organization, the easier it becomes to maintain them since they are few. Thus, only a few of Information Technology specialists will be required to maintain and manage the data system. The rest f the specialists can be used for other productive work to improve the efficiency of work. Therefore, virtualization will increase efficiency and provide a better server worker ratio that means saving more costs on labour.   It is not a wonder to find crowded offices or data centres in many organizations that require a lot of information. Physical servers require a lot of space to keep, especially considering a large organization might need to purchase them regularly when they cannot hold any more data. Having one hardware server with several servers on it is very economical in terms of space, since it has the ability to replace several hardware boxes and consolidate them in one hardware box. Thus, saving space is yet another rationale that many organizations have realized with virtualization. The saved space can be used for other purposes other than storing of data, which could be for a productive purpose. Power and cooling systems are yet another expensive part of maintaining physical servers where they all require power and cooling to keep them running efficiently. Having to manage several physical servers can prove to be a quite expensive compared to virtual machines. This provides yet another reason for implementing our project.   Another rationale for migrating from physical servers to virtual machines is flexibility. With virtual machines, a company has to use different hardware boxes for each department, such as one for production, and another one for marketing. On to the contrary, but for better, virtual machines allow one hardware box to have several servers at the same time while it allows one server to hold several workloads at the same time. Therefore, it allows incorporation of data into fewer systems that are more flexible since data is accessible from any of the virtual servers throughout the organization from fewer physical servers. With these reasons and rationale, an organization is able to achieve a higher competitive advantage through the benefits realized from virtualization, including efficiency of IT infrastructure. Project Goals and Objectives This project has several goals that it aims to achieve through virtualization of the Information Technology infrastructure. Huge costs are incurred every year with the need of purchasing new hard and their maintenance. This requires more space to put the physical servers. In addition, the more physical servers the organization has, the more specialists it requires for maintenance. Further, the project aims on reduce costs on its LAN and SAN. Finally, physical servers are not efficient in terms of speedy work and flexibility. Therefore, some of the goals of migrating from physical servers to virtual machined are to cut the costs involved in physical servers. Another goal is increasing efficiency through faster operations of tasks. Saving space is yet another goal in this project, considering the many physical servers needed to maintain the Information technology needs. Another goal is consolidating the IT infrastructure and efficient utilization of the assets. The main goal is to achieve a competitive advantage, which can only be met through these goals and several objectives. The first goal is cutting costs of running the Information Technology infrastructure of running several physical servers through establishing several virtual servers on one physical server. Having many physical servers requires a lot of maintenance that includes labor costs, buying new hardware as well as power for running and cooling them. The project aims to cut costs through reducing the costs of maintaining the hardware electricity bills and LAN and SAN costs. From this goal the projects derives several objectives through which the broad goal can be achieved. The project aims at reducing the physical servers by more than a half, which will reduce the amount of electricity consumption in the IT infrastructure. On the other hand, the SAN and LAN require many ports, which demand costs on the number of cables. The project aims to cut costs of maintaining hardware and purchasing new hardware. New physical server costs the organization around $12,300. New servers are needed in almost every three years to keep meet the needs of the organization. With virtual machines or servers, having to buy new physical servers may not be required since the number of physical servers needed is reduced. Virtual servers only require little memory to save huge loads of data unlike physical servers that are overloaded within short duration. In addition to costs of buying new hardware, there are costs of maintaining the hardware. Every hardware may require around $430 to maintain every year. Thus taking the cost of the new server to be $10,300, and a cost of $430 for maintenance, the company could save $ 51,500 needed for purchasing new servers in three years. In addition, the project aims to save $6,450 on maintenance of the five servers. Thus if five physical servers were replaced with one having several virtual servers, the only costs will include maintenance of one physical server, and purchases of five servers in three years. A lot of space is required to put the physical server. This project aims at reducing the congestion in the data centers through having many virtual servers on fewer physical servers. A sever rack may require a space of about two square meters and 4U in height. Thus, having 100 servers may require 10 racks, which will take up a big amount of space. Thus, virtualization will reduce the floor space used by the server racks. In addition, the project aims ate reducing the number of IT specialists in the IT infrastructure maintenance by half since the virtual machines will be easy to maintain. They services can be used for other purposes within the organization. In addition, when the physical servers are overloaded, it might require more floor space to put other servers, which could mean having another data space put in place, which would be quite expensive. Virtualization will reduce the amount of space used as well as eliminate the need to have another floor space for IT infrastructure in the future. Another objective of this task is to increase efficiency and utilization of resources effectively or to optimum. Virtualization allows use of one physical server’s hardware to be shared by many virtual machines each with different operating systems. When systems are in development sites, physical servers often fail in terms of efficiency. With different servers for each division’s development team in the organization, the servers keep increasing all the time. In addition, when development teams share the same physical server, reconfiguring of development as well as the test environments becomes a long process that requires a lot of labor. The project aims at eliminating such issues in the data management through virtualization that will allow running of different operating system environments in one physical server. This allows simultaneous development as well as testing of multiple environments in a shorter time as well as with least labor intensity. Moreover, with the ability to consolidate development and test environments, reconfiguration becomes quite easy. As such, the project will achieve efficiency and save time on such operations. More so, trough use of one physical server by many virtual machines, the servers are utilized to the optimum, as opposed to having several physical servers that may not be efficient as virtual machines are. Therefore, one physical server will be handling a bigger workload when virtualized as compared to several physical servers. Maintenance of physical servers requires having to suspend operations in order to conduct maintenance. Transferring data from one server to another takes time and requires stopping operations. This suspends many operations in the business, which has its costs to the business. With virtualization, there is capability of live migration where one does not have to stop operations to allow maintenance of the physical servers. This makes maintenance easy and quicker since switching from one physical server to another can be done live. Virtual servers are easily transferred from one physical server to another without the need to shut them off like physical servers. This ensures that end users of the virtual servers are not affected and work goes on without disruption. In addition, this allows continuity and availability of business, since there is independence and encapsulation in virtual machines. This makes virtual machines quite flexible since they can be moved from one server to another without having to interrupt any operations. In addition, virtual servers are allow use of different operating systems from the same physical server, making them quite easy and flexible to work with since they can be changed from one operating system to another without much labor. This allows users to change their virtual machines into any operating systems as well as move them to any server without much difficulty. A competitive advantage occurs with efficiency of operations in the organization. Information technology has become a mainstream in continuity of organizations, since information is the key to business success. Therefore, when information technology infrastructure is efficient, the operations of business become easier. This ensures timely decisions and informed judgment in the organization. Thus, a competitive advantage is achieved. In addition, reducing costs of running the infrastructure increases the competitive advantage. When the cost of production is lower and efficient, this increases the competitive advantage considering more can be done within a shorter period. Thus, there is increased production. This means that there is better and efficient utilization of the information technology assets, considering the labor intensity shall be reduced allowing the IT specialists to engage in other innovative activities. Achieving all these goals and objectives will lead to achieving the broad goal of increasing the competitive advantage. Project deliverables For any project to be successful there has to be a set of documentation that clearly defines the process and procedures to follow in order to achieve the desired goals and objectives. The purpose of the documents is to deliver the right information that will be required for the project. This project has several deliverables that are aimed at helping the teams working on the project to have an assessment criterion for determining whether they have met the objectives of the project. Project deliverables in this project are used to provide direction and focus to the teams involved, defining what each team needs to be achieving. Project Management Every projects required management, despite its size if it is to realize its goals and objectives. With management, there has to be policies and procedures of making decisions as well as who is involved in what, and who accounts for what. Thus, project management will have several documents for enhancing organization of the plan. The principle of the project management document is to record all the goals and objectives of the project, the plan, policies, strategies as well as the procedures to follow in execution of the project. This ensures giving direction to the project. One of the documents recorded in this deliverable is the project proposal that records what the project is all about, its targets as well as its worth to the organization. This document will be used by management to prove whether the project is viable or not. The other document under this deliverable is the project plan, which any project cannot do without. This document is used in evaluation and management of the project through comparing the progress and outcomes to the intended outcomes. Other plans could emerge as the project is ongoing, hence, updating will be required. The other document is a budget plan for the project. A project without a financial budget might go out of control. The budget is used by the management to ensure that funds are utilized as intended and that they do not get out of control during the project process. The management needs to be keen in making a budget for the virtualization to make sure everything goes as planned. The other deliverable document to record under this category is the resources assignment that states where each fund will be utilized in the project. The resource assignment document also states the errands of each person in the panel and their roles to ensure accountability. Customer Requirement Document This deliverable records the needs of the customers or stakeholders in terms of the virtualization process. The documents records the activities of interviewing stakeholder, feedback form questionnaires used in gathering more information on requirements, security solution goals as well as the requirements hat might occur in the future. It also records plans on future technology plans that might be needed after virtualization. The document should make sure to include these entire requirements for reference in the future in case other plans have to be made. Test Plan The test plan document is aimed at documenting the tests that shall be involved in the server virtualization process. Every project needs to have a test to ensure that it is performing the intended purpose. Thus, this document states the tests that are involved. Some of the tests can include security tests considering there will be need to secure information of the organization. In addition, the security tests will be used to plan an end-to-end integration of test networks, storage as well as layers of security. The document should include a preparation of deployment focusing on development and security solution including details in the design test plan for the system. This will help the project teams in their tests since without a documented test plan the project it will be hard to find out whether security and development have been successful. This counts as a virtualization test plan a well as test plan for security to ensure everything in the virtualized system is seamlessly functional. Training and Development After virtualization, it will be a requirement to train and develop the information technology tea in handling the virtualized system to ensure the team is able to maintain and handle any issues that might arise. In order to be even more successful with this project in the future it will be essential to have continued training or development of the team. This will empower them to be more creative and innovative. The continued education and development should not only aim at training the specialists in the virtualization field concerned with the project, but also other diverse fields that are emerging in the IT industry. This ensures to have a strong tea of experts that can deal with diversified issues in IT. Thus, the company will be reducing the chances of needing external help to solve problems when they occur. Moreover, it will be quite good to have a competent team of IT specialists with high level of productivity. Thus, this deliverable documents the process through which this is to take place during and after the project is complete. In addition, the end users will require few skills of getting the best out of their virtual machines such as being shown on how one can get access to information from across the organization with ease. In addition, to achieve the goals of the project such as efficiency and full utilization of assets, the end users might need to know what is expected of them after virtualization. Hence, some training would be of great importance. Technical Document Considering the project is technical in nature, there is needed to have a technical document that specifies the procedures that can be used in the upholding of the servers as well as the virtual machines. In many causes, employees leave an organization, and others have to be brought in to replace them. Just like other operations and transactions are recorded in various offices for future reference, IT infrastructure requires documentation for the IT team to refer to in the future. When older employees are replaced by newer ones, without proper documentation work might be disrupted. Therefore, the technical documentation should specify the system in a way that a new employee can be able to understand. The document should aim at making the IT team understand all the specifications of the system of severs and the virtual machines in order to ensure that work goes on as usual. The technical document should also state what could be repaired as well as replaced after how long to keep them running smooth. The document should document the methods used in the processes, their installation as well as their use. This document is supposed to act as a manual guide for handling the new systems to ensure users will not be stranded when problems arise. The document is supposed to state all the features of the system, the functions as well the purpose of the necessary items most needed such as which virtual machines are using which physical server as well as the capabilities. Monitoring and reporting Finally, monitoring and reporting of issues in the virtualized servers is the final deliverable in this project whose aim is to document the methodology used in monitoring of the systems such as checking for any errors that might occur. This is then reported to the maintenance team to check the problem. The advantage with virtualized servers is that one can use programs such as the vSync among others that make monitoring quite easy as well as reporting. This document should specify what should be used in monitoring and reporting of any issues in the servers as well as what should be done. References Cisco (2010). For Le Bourget Communaute, there is no limit to what can be virtualized! Retrieved from: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/Bourget_UK.pdf Schmidt, D. & Rispoli, J. (2009). Simplify Migration of Legacy Servers to Virtual Machines. Dell Power Solutions. Read More