Planning an Application Server Migration - Assignment Example

Planning an Application Server Migration Planning an Application Server Migration The main of this paper is to show planning an application server migration for a large international purchasing company that has just bought a growing local company that manufactures western wear at several locations To provide support for the remote offices, Remote Desktop services will be employed. The company will store applications, information and data in a central point i.e. an application server. The application server used will be windows server 2003 because it provides load balancing, failover and clustering hence it will give us the opportunity to concentrate on business logic. The remote Desktop services will enable all the users login to the server to access and run applications and programs from their desktops. The employees will use the program known as Remote Desktop to access files in the server. They will be able to connect to it from any device and will be able to share their programs, files, data and applications with any other employee in the server. However, the employees can also be restricted from accessing other users data if need be. The Employees will be able to print from their remote desktop servers to local printers located in the servers. This is because the server will be used as a cloud desktop thus providing the following services: Hosting desktops remote users’ access to corporate files and data, Mobile users and Application development (Pivot, 2014). The benefits of the terminal services include making the tasks easier since the programs are installed once on the server instead of being installed in each of the employees desktop. Remote desktop applications servers are also necessary for programs that use much bandwidth and require substantial processing power (Sutton, 2008). To add on many programs do not perform well when they are accessed from the internet, but they will perform well when hosted with a terminal server as the processing is done centrally in the server, and the user will only see the screen. As a result, any user will have excellent performance even on a dial up account. Thus, a dial up user on a hosted terminal server can use the internet as well as access the applications with the speed of high internet access (Menzel, 2006). Servers are controlled environments working throughout the day. Security is also enhanced as there are locked doors, cabinets, and video surveillance. The controlling equipment also controls the moisture content of the air. For the provision of the remote support services and applications to the satellite applications, the following applications have to be implemented: i. There has to be full fidelity user experience to improve the remote user experience, compared with the experience that the users might experience when they access the same resources locally. This remote user experience in RDS will include multi-monitor support, redirection support for windows media player, bi-directional audio, as well as higher bitmap acceleration for 3D applications and quality media content like Silver-light and Flash. ii. RD connection broker that creates a unified administrator experience for terminal services and emerging virtual machine-based remote desktops (VDI). iii. RemoteApp and desktop connections to simplify access to various resources, such as RemoteApp programs. It will be easy to set up and automatically update the applications in use at the satellite offices. The terminal services will have two modes of operation. Remote Administration mode and Application Server mode. Remote Administration mode permits two concurrent connections and is designed to permit administrators remotely to manage a server by using a Terminal Services client. This setting minimizes impact on server performance. Application Server mode is designed to provide access to a Windows 2000-based computer desktop and its programs for users connecting with a Terminal Services client. This setting optimizes program response time. This article describes how to change between these two modes of operation. Determine how application pools will help to reduce costs When the IIS 6.0 is run in worker process isolation mode, the company can separate different web applications and websites into groups called application pools. An application inside an application pool shares the same worker process. Each of the worker processes operates as separate instances of the worker processes executable. This ensures that the worker processes that services an application process is separated from another worker processes that services other application processes and keeps process boundaries so that whenever applications are assigned tone application pool, the processes outside it do not affect it. This reduces the cost of repairing the whole system whenever there is a failure. IIS6.0 was released to provide high security, reliability and improved performance. However, we will use IIS 7.0 because it converts the high quality base of IIS6.0 web server to a modular and extensible platform with needed support for the vital modern deployment and management scenario. III7.0 will provide a higher degree of performance improvements and cause a reduction in costs, as a result, of performance related costs. There will also be improvements in the socket layer and windows authentication. It has also incorporated new features in that it is more flexible. This includes leaner web services as it is implemented modularly thus its features can be added or removed independently without affecting its performance. The organization will thus be able to add or remove any features they wish thus resulting in improved performance and reducing any possible threats of attack (Technet Magazine, 2008). AD and NTFS PERMISSIONS Using AD groups and NTFS permissions should best be configured for security and appropriate access. Active directory provides a secure environment that users can use to communicate with the network components that are provided by the organization. Active desktop has a central component that enables information sharing and availability. To improve security in the active desktop more attributes can be added to the database. The active directory will then transmit different environments to the forest thus improving the security. Each user should also be given a single username and password as a NetID, thus allowing the system give the foundation for the exchange and SharePoint services. NFFS encompasses both standard and special permissions. It is an operating system part and thus will be used by the employee remotely to locate files they need. In windows server 2003 NTFS uses ‘closed software code’ to dynamically store files. The home and public folders should be placed on different volumes from the operating system before setting any permission. This will ensure that the backup is simplified as possible because there will be no need for an organization to back up the public folders and applications. It also restricts the users access to the level that the organization sees as appropriate. The next step will be for an organization to create groups together with individual employee user accounts according to the member priorities and assign them standard permissions such as read write and execute. The owner of the group will be assigned full control of the files. This serves to ensure that the employees are able to use the files that have been created by others remotely. Other users will not be granted access. For optimal application execution software frameworks that create an application implementation. This framework acts as a gateway to the developer. Windows SharePoint Services to provide support for the additional remote users Microsoft SharePoint is a Microsoft web application framework. The framework incorporates intranet, content management and document management. It is capable of providing collaboration, and file management. SharePoint includes a complete web technology and standard APIs. It provides central management as an application platform together with security controls for the implementation of its requirements. It integrates directly into the IIS including IIS 7.0 thus allowing for the managing and providing of servers as needed by hosting providers. The organization can use it to store and track the electronic files or even the applications used by the employees. It then keeps track of the different versions developed by the employees. The employees can also quickly view who made changes to a particular file. Metadata is also part of the file hence employees can quickly set up views to track how the metadata has changed over time. Its ability to centrally store information is then used reduce duplicated work in the organization. Its ability to connect to extranets can be used to provide encrypted web facing access to the remote employees (Husman, 2007). The group then uses this to provide collaboration environment to its employees. Its ability to provide an alternate access mapping that enables the same site to be accessed by different people through different URLs can also be used to provide access to the employees while at the same time enhancing security as each URL can be given its separate authentication technology. This also has the benefit of allowing the site to act as an intranet to the desired employees and extranet to the others. To provide high availability, the organization has to hit a balance between maximizing the scale and isolation. It thus has to employ a combination of the pool models. There will be multiple application pools with each given a particular purpose, for example; Web servers that contain static content are contained in a single shared application pool. This might include web servers that host applications. This will not affect their performance as static content is not affected by the security and performance concerns that are associated with dynamic content. The other application pools will be dedicated to the web servers that contain dynamic content. This will allow the organization to allocate enough resources to the active servers. The organization uses shared hosting environment hence the only possible configuration will be this hybrid. Examine how you can use high-availability technologies to manage costs High availability technology allows the organization performs maintenance without downtime. The density increases may affect the remote users. With high availability technology single firewalls, switch or a single PDU failure cannot affect the organizations availability. This ensures continual availability hence more productivity and cost savings. The oracle cluster ware is a single high availability software solution that will be used on its own hence eliminating the cost and complexity of maintaining other software. This will in turn result in lowering of costs. Another high availability technology will be a replication in which the organization will maintain the state and configuration across all the web front end in the farm. Another fundamental requirement for mass-hosting, HA environments, is maintaining state and configuration across all Web front ends in the farm. Although there are other configurations that must exist on each front end, the most important is that of the Web server. Some Web servers Application pools such as the IIS 7.0 reduces the cost by lowering the bandwidth costs. It uses the HTTP compression thus reducing the size of the response greatly. All desktops also support it and the decompressing costs on desktop hardware are minimal compared to the latency savings from sending fewer data. Since compression is based on Content-Encoding negotiation defined in the HTTP 1.1 protocol, enabling it is safe for clients that do not support compression—these clients simply receive an uncompressed version of the content. It will also provide the two compression features i.e. static compression and dynamic compression. Static compression compresses the files prior to their sending and saves them in the disk, thus allowing future requests to send already compressed files without the added overhead cost of compression. In dynamic compression, the files are compressed in real time and thus compresses for the response by the applications. High availability technologies come at a higher cost. However, technologies such as the Oracle Grid infrastructure can bring about lower costs, greater scalability and optimal use of the resources (Oracle® Database, 2011). The organization will carefully analyze the capabilities of this infrastructure to ensure it has an optimal combination of high availability to ensure it keeps the business running. The IT infrastructure in the organization that supports the users encounter must be highly available and disaster proof so as to eliminate costs of maintenance and loss of information. If there are any chances of failures, this data should be backed up at regular intervals at their local servers and their replicas, send to the redundant remote high speed connected servers. There is redundancy provided in the remote servers, and they are synchronized. How to use Terminal Services to help meet criteria for providing applications and support for the remote offices. Take advantage of the change in licensing considerations There will be a change in licensing terms because the applications will be installed on the application server. It is from this that the employees will be able to access the applications. Because the applications are installed in the server licensing will only be done on the server and hence the deployments to the various remote desktops will not require licensing. Contrarily when applications are installed in the various workstations they will require individual unique licenses hence more costly. Furthermore, an application may need more than one license for the different users thus sky thus making it more costly. To take advantage on this the applications will be installed on the server and accessed remotely by the remote users thus lowering the cost. Manage network load balancing and avoid slowdowns in performance Load balancing increases the efficiency of the network and resources thus bringing about better performance redundancy and scalability over time (Austin, 2013). The network traffic will be distributed between the servers to avoid network bottlenecks. Multiple servers will also be installed to provide for the redundancy thus allowing continued operation incase other links are operational. Because there are multiple Web front-ends, the hosting architect has to consider many options for distributing the configuration across all Web servers. This configuration is dependent upon the type of load-distribution model that is chosen. There are several models for distributing load across multiple Web front ends. We will discuss two that are common to hosting scenarios. These are application load distribution and aggregate load distribution. Application Load Distribution Application load distribution is the method where the load is distributed across the web fronts depending on the servers function. It is request based and leverages the application layer routing capabilities supported by the load balancers. It will allow the organization divide the web farm depending on the server’s functions. The organization will assign static content to the servers that do not have dynamic content. Servers such as ASP.NET that server dynamic content will be assigned dynamic content. The dynamic servers will further be divided into groups based on their jobs. For example all ASP.NET servers will be allocated ASP.NET application whereas PHP servers will be allocated PHP content. Some dynamic servers will be implemented using the aggregate load distribution model. This will allow the servers share the same configuration so that they can be managed easily Configuring the print server Before configuring the print server you must ensure that i. The operating system has the correct configuration. In windows server 2003 for example, the print server rely on the correct configuration of the OS and the operating systems services. The default configuration of windows server 2003 will however work fine. However if you upgraded to windows server 2003 you can confirm their correctness with the settings in the default settings for services (microsoft, 2005). ii. The computer is joined to an Active Directory domain as a member server. The computer is joined to an Active Directory domain as a member server. If you want to restrict access to a printer, so that some domain users can print to it and other users cannot, or you want the print server to publish shared printers to Active Directory so that domain users can easily search for those printers, the print server must be joined to a domain. If you do not need to perform either of these tasks, the print server does not need to be joined to a domain. All existing disk volumes use the NTFS file system. FAT32 volumes are less secure. For more information about encrypting data stored on NTFS volumes, including spooled print jobs The printer is deployed using the Casper Admin in order to grab the mappings. The LPD settings on the system are then installed. A Casper remote would then be used in order to add drivers and mapping on the different servers. References Austin. (2013, September 25). avende. Retrieved June 12, 2014, from The need for Network Traffic Management(Load Balancing): http://avende.com/the-need-for-network-traffic-management-load-balancing/ Husman, G. (2007). Beginning sharepoint administration: Windows sharepoint services and sharepoint portal server. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Menzel, W. P. (2006). REMOTE SENSING APPLICATIONS WITH. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin. microsoft. (2005, January 21). microsoft technet. Retrieved from Print server role: Configuring a print server: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc775791%28v=ws.10%29.aspx Oracle® Database. (2011). Oracle® Database High Availability Overview. Retrieved from Oracle® Database High Availability Overview: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28281/hadesign.htm#g1007388 Pivot. (2014, June 12). Pivot. Retrieved june 12, 2014, from Hosted Remote Desktop Application Server: http://pivotnetworks.com/hosted-cloud/hosted-remote-desktop-application-server/ Sutton, C. (2008). J2EE development. Oxford express. Technet Magazine. (2008, September). Retrieved from Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.09.iis.aspx Read More