Comparison of Virtualization Platforms: VMware and Hyper-V

The assignment content discusses the role of IT virtualization in companies, particularly Company A. It highlights the benefits of implementing virtualization infrastructure, including cost savings and improved support. The type of virtual server selected also affects company performance. The content also compares VMware and Hyper-V, two popular virtualization platforms, discussing their features and suitability for different organizations.

IT virtualisation
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................4
TASK 1.................................................................................................................................................4
1.1 Commercial impact and potential of virtual infrastructure.......................................................4
TASK 3.................................................................................................................................................7
Management of virtualisation environment.....................................................................................9
CONCLUSION..................................................................................................................................10
References...........................................................................................................................................11
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INTRODUCTION
IT Virtualisation refers to the developing a virtual version of systems rather than actual
which includes operating system, server, storage devices, network systems, etc. With the help of
virtualisation, companies can run number of operating systems or other applications on the same
server (Virtualization, 2016). It leads to increase the agility, flexibility and scalability in the field of
IT along with cost saving. Firms can manage their workload with the help of faster and quality
performance of the systems (Beal, 2016).
The present study is based on the give case scenario. It includes commercial impact and
potential of virtualisation, designing for virtualisation deployments, Along with this, file involves
implementation and management of the virtualisation.
TASK 1
1.1 Commercial impact and potential of virtual infrastructure
As per the given case, company A is using one application to one server infrastructure. It
results to increase the electrical charges due to the high consumption of the resources. It has
employed 10 servers for performing its tasks. The commercial impact of the virtual infrastructure
are positive which are described below. Cost: Implementation of the virtual infrastructure at the place of present infrastructure in the
company will reduce the cost of hardware and upgrading cost of the software or applications
(Data Center Virtualization, 2016). It will also help in increasing the platform for many
servers so that, company can work properly and can handle its issue of high electrical
charges. Along with this, it will save the cost by reducing the need of hardware servers and
related resources. After proper implementation of IT virtualisation, it helps in minimizing
the cost regarding the administration and management of the manual. Technology: This will give an opportunity to increase use of the latest techniques which will
result to better functioning and performance. Company will start using cloud computing
which will help in sharing work among the team members. It will result to organise time,
resources and cost effectively. On the other hand, virtual infrastructure will provide to
improve network connections among the various servers and will increase the use of virtual
drives for storing the information (Virtualization vs. Cloud Computing: What's the
Difference, 2016). This will help the company A in increasing its market position and
reputation among the clients. It will include hypervisor, a Virtual machine host, virtual
drivers such as free virtual drive software, a para-virtualised network adapter and physical
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networking which includes bridged, internal, host only networking, etc. Support: The virtual infrastructure will provide its services in the form of centralisation
which will help in managing each and every work properly and effectively. Along with it,
testing of required resources will also take place for proper allocation and utilisation of them
in the company environment. The overall centralisation of the infrastructure will result to
improve the performance and working of the enterprise. It will also help in effective
utilisation of the resources by running number of servers on a single virtual host. It will help
the company A in better management and maintenance of their resources (Maity and Dass,
2014). Redundancy: This will provide an opportunity to reduce the number of redundancies with
the help of appropriate strategies such as mirroring, server image backup, load balancing,
etc. With the help of server image backup in virtual machine, company can create a copy of
operating system and all the information regarding to it (Chong, 2013). It will help in
collecting all the information in a single pass. On the other hand, load balancing will help
the company in distributing its internet traffic across the various servers. It will help in rising
the performance of the servers and their optimum utilisation.
 Scalability: It refers to the ability of the computer applications to continuously perform and
function well regardless of the change in size or volume for meeting the user's requirement.
Virtualisation is highly scalable and provides business an opportunity to develop additional
resources as per the requirement of many applications (Khan, Talib and Faisal, 2015). For
example, Company A can easily add extra server with the virtual host without any
investment on time or money. Along with this, it will help the firm in creating new servers
quickly and easily as there is no need to buy new hardware every time.
Task 2
Identification of company A's need
Company A is facing some issues related to the management of information due to the lack
of proper server and warehouse. For resolving this issues, firm needs to implement the virtual server
in its working environment which is as follows.
Corporate Requirement: It is requirement of the user to virtualise the servers for better
performance and proper utilisation of the resources. In present situation, company A is facing
various issues with respect to the servers, their cost, maintenance and electrical charges. By
implementing virtual servers, firm will able to maintain its servers and it will also reduce the cost of
various hardware, As there will be one virtual host so it will also reduce the electrical charges.
Storage: For better storage of the information, it is requirement of the company to implement
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virtualisation in its working environment. It will help the firm in better storing of the files and other
related important information in effective manner. Company needs proper safety and security while
storing information into its servers which can be provided by the virtual servers.
Maximizing Uptime: Company A needs to response ass the requirement of the clients and ity is
possible with the help of virtualisation. It gives guaranteed uptime to the servers and aplications
which results to recover the damage in very fast speed.
Proper protection and security: It is important for the companies to keep their confidential
information safe and secure (Sharma and Gutiérrez, 2010). Company A wants to keep its all the
information safe by protecting applications. With the help of server virtualisation, company can
keep a copy of applications and information without purchasing any hardware.
Designing of new virtual infrastructure
For designing new virtual infrastructure, company needs 1 vitual server with more than 50
virtual machines. Company A can select any of the server from this virtualisation software Vmare,
Microsoft's Hyper- V, Critx XenServer, etc. Company will able to run its virtual servers on 4 to 6
CPUs (Data Center Virtualization, 2016). On the other hand for storage, company A can use SATA
drivers in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array. This will also help in the improving the performance.
Design for solution
Process for designing the solution for the virtual infrastructure is as follows.
Assessing the current environment:
In this, company needs to assess its environment for implementing two virtual servers.
While implementing visualization infrastructure, company will need to convert its physical servers
intop the virtual machines and for this it will need to understand the performance characteristic of
its servers, software and other applications.
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Along with this, company A needs use its performance monitoring tools for identifying peak
utilisation of the CPU, memory, network and disk resources on those two servers firm wants to
virtualise.
Planning virtual environment
In this, company needs to choose the virtual platform for hosting its virtual machines.
Company A can take Vmware and Vsphere as both of these have rich features and provides solid
performance metrics with broad guest OS support (Maity and Dass, 2014).
Hardware for Virtualisation:
It is very difficult task to design the requirement of hardware as per the virtual infrastructure.
In this company A needs to identify the specifications of the hardware for the chosen virtual servers.
It needs to determine it on the basis of compatibility, storage availability, memory allocation,
processor capability, network bandwidth, etc.
For example:
Hardware Requirement for Server Virtualisation are as follows:
 16 GB RAM
 4 TB hard disk space
 OS in ESXI,
 2*3 Gh dual core processors Vsphere desktop application
Feasibility:
In this, company A will identify the feasibility of the selected solution as per its work and
requirements. It will determine the answers of some questions like Does the selected solution
provide the needed functionality? Is a server solution better than the desktop?, etc.
Deployment image requirement:
In this company will identify the required memory for the efficient work and operations,
software for installing applications, updating them, etc, selection of the operating system, etc. All
these factors will be designed by the organisation.
Environmental analysis:
At last, company needs to analyse its environment for making interaction between the
various factors such as network addressing, access to the local and remote storage, etc.
TASK 3
Implementation of Virtualisation Deployment
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As per the given case, company A needs to create two virtual machines and network these
together. There need to have correct memory, CPU and storage resources. One server selected by
the company is VM Server whose specifications are as follows.
Processor: One virtual processor on a host with one or more logical processors. Along with it, a
multiprocessor host with the two CPUs
Chip Set:
 Intel 440BX-based motherboard
 NS338 SIO 82093AA IOAPIC
Memory: 3.6GB
Graphics: VGA and SVGA suuport
Floppy Drive: two 1.44MB floppy devices
Serial Ports: 4 serial ports and output serial ports.
Virtual Network:
 Ethernet based protocols such as TCP/IP, Microsoft networking, Samba, Novell Netware,
etc.
 It supports 9 or more virtual Ethernet switches.
For installing Vmware company needs to follow the following procedure
11 Start Vmware Workstation11 Enter the serial number of the product which is on the registered card in the package (if its
first time to open Vmware station)11 Start the New Virtual Machine Wizard11 Use NEXT for navigating from the series of the screens11 Select the method which company wants to configure the virtual machine
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11 If company has selected Typical then skip this step. Otherwise, on selection of the Custom,
company needs to create a virtual machine which supports the workstation 5.11 Finally, selects the guest operating system.11 Select the name and folder for the virtual machine11 Choose the number of processors for the VM.
111 Configure the networking capability of the VM
111 Select the type of SCSI adapter
111 Select the disk
111 Select to create an IDE or SCSI disk
111 Specify the capacity
111 Configure the location for the virtual disk files
111 Finish
Another server decided by the Company A is Microsoft's Hyper server whose requirement
are as follows.
Processor: x86-64 processor with hardware assisted virtualisation support.
Memory: 2 GB (minimum) and 4 TB (maximum)
Guest operating system:
 Hyper-V in windows server 2008 and 2008 R2 with up to 4 processors each.
 Hyper-V supports both 32 bit and 64 bit guest Vms.
The implementation of the virtualisation deployment is as follows. Build virtual environment: In this phase, company needs to install is servers and load its
selected virtualisation hypervisor. It will also load the centralised management platform for
effective use of services and resources. At the end, virtual hosts will be connected to the
management platform (Data Center Virtualization, 2016).
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 Configuration of virtual environment: In this, company A needs to configure its both the
servers with their static Internet Protocol (IP) addressees. In addition to it, firm needs to
configure its network setting and VLAN as per the requirement of the virtual servers. Secure the virtual environment: In this step, company A will set some hard and complex
passwords on the virtual infrastructure by developing new VM's and installing clean
operating systems (OS). Firm also need to perform a P2V conversion with the help of
VMARE's converter enterprise. Monitoring of virtual environment: In this phase, company will monitor the functioning of
the new virtual host by using tools such as free version of ESXi Server and Vsphere Client.
With the change in time, firm can changes its tool for monitoring the performance of its
virtual infrastructure.
 Maintenance of virtual environment: Company needs to maintain its virtual environment
time to time. If company is using software of the Vmare or Vsphere then it can maintain the
updates with the help of Update manager. With this manager, company can able to keep all
its patches on the ESX servers easily.
TASK 4
Management of virtualisation environment
For performance testing company A needs to follow the following points.
Measurement of business performance
During the machine is under load, company A needs to measure the response time of both
the servers. In addition to the monitoring of the application for availability and throughput. While
measuring both the factors, it is important that systems are stable and responsive.
Measurement of capacity/Hardware utilisation
When virtual environment is operating under full load, company A should make ensure that
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both the physical and virtual host are utilised within the accepted and planned level (Maity and
Dass, 2014). In addition to this, it needs to evaluate the key server stress point which includes CPU
configuration, server IO throughput and memory utilisation for optimal performance of the virtual
infrastructure.
Measurement of the change in scalability from the physical to virtual hosts
In this, company A needs to identify the key failure points in both the applications and
virtual servers for evaluating the performance.
Company A uses two virtual servers Vmware and Microsoft's Hyper V for the
implementation of virtualisation infrastructure. After implementation of these machines and
performance testing, their critical review regarding the performance is as follows.
As per my point of view the Vmware ESXi hypervisor is the best host and provides various
features for the virtualisation. Along with it, the performance of this server is much better as
compare to the Microsoft's Hyper V. On the other hand, Microsoft's Hyper V is able to distribute
traffic properly which results to manage the work effectively and to access the internet without any
disturbance. In contrast to it, scalability of the Vmware is more as compare to the Hyper V. Vmware
provides imp-roved and effective scalability. It can support 64 hosts in a cluster and can
accommodate 8000 virtual machines whereas Hyper V can host up to 1024 Virtual machines only.
With reference to the security, both the server provides central management security. In
Vmware, it is possible to manage the passwords centrally whereas Hyper V manages the security
and passwords with the help of active directory. On the other hand, Hyper V is effective for the
large organisations as it provides unlimited host to host replications of the virtual machines whereas
Vmware is for small shops and organisations by creating HA clusters of three hosts.
CONCLUSION
From the above analysis, it is concluded that IT virtualisation plays important role in the
development and growth of the IT companies. It helps in managing and maintaining the work
properly and effectively From the given case, Company A gets various benefits by implementing
virtualisation infrastructure within its working environment. These advantages are related to the
cost, support, technology, etc. On the other hand, performance of the company also depends upon
the type of virtual server it selects.
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REFERENCES
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