Virtualization Proposal for Soft Arc Engineering

Running head: VIRTUALIZATION PROPOSAL FOR SOFT ARC ENGINEERING 1
Virtualization Proposal for Soft Arc Engineering

VIRTUALIZATION PROPOSAL FOR SOFT ARC ENGINEERING 2
Executive summary
This paper is a proposal for migrating the Soft Arc Engineering IT resources and facilities to
create a virtual data center platform. The company has different operating systems running
different applications including mail, CRM, and web servers in individual server machines. It is
proposed that a virtual data center be developed, using the VMware vSphere suite of tools. The
enterprise data center will have virtualization achieved in the individual machines to create
virtual machines, and then vSphere networking used to create an enterprise network with all
physical computers aggregated and clustering done when installing the various applications and
software to prevent software and hardware failures. The data-center will have a private cloud
with a NAS for backup and then linked to two public clouds to create a mirror cop backup of the
private cloud and map the entire data center so that in the event of a disaster, the entire system
can continue running from the cloud. The backup will be done to the cloud as well as in the
physical data center in partitioned virtual machines with additional VMs in the cloud to enable
business process continuity in the event of a disaster. Security will be achieved through physical
and software firewalls, as well as using malware and the VMware NNSX security platform. The
physical servers are clustered after installing VMs to create virtual desktops that using the
VMware Workstation, the virtual desktops can be accessed from any location and users connect
using thin clients. VMware is chosen because of its several features, including speed, security,
scalability and agility, as well as its ability to create virtual platforms with multiple operating
systems

VIRTUALIZATION PROPOSAL FOR SOFT ARC ENGINEERING 3
Virtualization Proposal for Soft Arc Engineering
Proposed Virtual Infrastructure
The proposed virtual technology to be used at SoftArc is the VM Ware family of
virtualization products; VM Ware is popular software for virtualization and cloud computing that
enables the installation of a hyper visor in a physical server machine and this allows multiple
VMs (virtual machines) to run on a single physical server. Every VM is capable of running its
own operating system and this is one of the main reasons for selecting VM Ware; multiple
operating systems can be run on its virtual platforms (Davis, 2019). The company has 2 active
domain controllers on Windows server 2008 R2 running on a 2x Xeon 3.6 GHz machine, 3 x
SQL Server 2003 databases running on Windows Serer 2003 on a 2x Intel Xeon 2.8Ghz
machine. There is also a single Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for mail also running on a
Windows server machine with 2 x Xeon 3.6 GHz. There are 4x Windows server file and print
servers running on a 2x Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz machine. There is a single SharePoint 2007 server
also running on Windows 2008 Server R2 on a 2x Xeon 3.6 GHZ machine. The firm also has a
single Client Design and a CRM application server running on Windows Server R 2 on a 2x Intel
Xeon 3.6 GHz machine. There I also a 2x Red hat Enterprise Linux 5 servers running Tom Cat
and Apache on a 2x Xeon 2.8GHz machine. VMware (VMware vSphere) has been chosen given
the multiple operating environments the firms’ applications run from. VMware also offers
maximum availability levels as well as the fastest possible reaction speed for all services and
applications. VMware features enable the design of reliable and flexible virtual systems and can
comfortably host several virtual servers on which VMs are hosted. VMware has a feature, the
VMotion that enables VMs to be moved between hosts with zero downtime, ensuring highest
levels of operation.
Proposed technical Infrastructure
The company has 7 physical server machines, each running a number of servers and
applications; the objective of this proposed design is to leverage and maximize the use of the
physical machines and extend them to ensure high availability, reliability, low power
consumption, and enable storage and backup. The enterprise servers will be connected to create a
single enterprise network using vSphere networking. After installing the VMware suite, the
vSphere platform will form the platform for virtualization; it is made up of features that allow
virtualization, management, and the creation of interface layers. The following layers will be set
up to create the Soft Arc Engineering (SAE) virtual environment;
The virtualization layer
This layer of the VMware vSphere has application and infrastructure services;
infrastructure services include facilities such as computing, storage, network services abstraction,
aggregation, and allocation of infrastructure or hardware resources. The compute services of the