Simple Studios Network Infrastructure Upgrade Project: BIT371 Capstone

This project focuses on upgrading the network infrastructure for Simple Studios Pty Ltd, a graphic design company experiencing growth and needing to expand its production capabilities. The goal is to implement a software-defined networking solution using VMware vSphere to support increased production scale, improve employee workspace, and enhance data storage and access. The project scope includes a feasibility study, network design, ESXi configuration, connection testing, vCenter server deployment, cloud storage setup, and data migration. Deliverables involve virtual machine libraries, vCenter Server Appliance deployment, ESXi configuration, cloud storage setup, and data migration testing. The project utilizes virtualization techniques to transition from physical to logical network infrastructure, reducing infrastructure costs and improving resource utilization. Key aspects include resource allocation, bandwidth management, and traffic shaping. References include research on VMware vSphere, cloud computing, and data center virtualization. The project aims to provide a robust and scalable network infrastructure to meet Simple Studios' growing business needs.

Project scope
The scope of this project is to upgrade the network infrastructure from existing
infrastructure design of Simple Studios Pty Ltd. This implementation will support the
increased scale of production. The employees will have better physical space and upgraded
infrastructure of the devices to meet customer’s deadline and handle the production size. The
new storage (datacentre hosts) will be accessed remotely by the server (Erl, Puttini and
Mahmood 2013). The hosts' datacentre is no longer need to connect with the server
physically. It will allow the business to reduce the investments into infrastructure maintaining
and preservation.
Overview
Virtualization techniques shift the thought process from physical to logical network
infrastructure. VMware uses the physical storage resources as logical resources. Hence,
VMware builds an abstraction layer between the physical components and the actual
computing that takes place on the cloud platform (Gallagher, S., 2013). The VMware Cloud
Automation Design and Deploy service works as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and helps
in upgrading from existing infrastructure to a new model of delivery methods. The
infrastructure as a Service with cloud computing model has become a very practical solution
to reduce cost and improve the use of resources. vSphere is a VMware cloud computing
platform that allows managing virtualized deployments (Chaolong, Hanning and Lili 2016).
The vSphere will provide the private cloud by using the company's own datacentres. It is
expected that the new infrastructure will provide virtual servers with a specific IP address to
access the data storages.

Deliverables
i. Analysis: Feasibility study, analysis of the system requirement and
configuration of the upgraded device.
ii. Design: The network design including architecture, virtual center server
(vCenter), components functionality diagrams and authentication activity
design.
iii. ESXi configuration: Installation of ESXi in VMware and setting a static IPv4
address and default gateway in ESXi host.
iv. Connection testing: Test connection by using ping on the used static IP
address.
v. Deployment: Installation and configuration of software package vCenter
server which will act as a datacentre for the other virtual machines and ESXi
hosts.
vi. Cloud storage: Creation of new datacentre hosts using previously set IP
address. The data center will add virtual disks that are physically connected to
the server and hosts machine.
vii. Data mitigation: Installation of Microsoft SQL server and create the database
tables and objects (Wu et al. 2014). Loading of the data in cloud storage using
the import feature in My SQL server.
viii. Data migration: Using drag and drop feature to move file or directories from
one host to another.
Resources
The project will need a project manager while the group members are going to play
different roles. For setting up a virtual machine, resources allocation settings are the first

thing that was discussed. A server does not allocate more than the upper limit of the physical
configurations; even the resources are unused by the system. For example, the number of
cores that a processor has, clock speed in megahertz, installed memory in gigabytes, input-
output operations per second (Guo et al. 2014). The discussion included how to operate the
virtual machine (VMware) with the physical resources like storage, processor and memory.
Also, administrative controls, procedures and allocations and where they exist. It is found that
ESXi manages the bandwidth of the network and disk on a per-host basis. However, traffic
shaping will be needed to do for network and proportional share mechanisms (clusters) for
storage. The shares are customarily specified as low, normal or high with a ratio of 1:2:4,
respectively. The project will require to assign the shares manually, which will depend on the
other virtual machines or resource pools that are going to be used in the cluster. The shares of
the configuration can be changed before starting the virtual machine except for memory.
References:
Chaolong, J., Hanning, W. and Lili, W., 2016. Study of smart transportation data center
virtualization based on vmware vsphere and parallel continuous query algorithm over
massive data streams. Procedia engineering, 137, pp.719-728.
Erl, T., Puttini, R. and Mahmood, Z., 2013. Cloud computing: concepts, technology &
architecture. Pearson Education.
Gallagher, S., 2013. VMware private cloud computing with vCloud Director. John Wiley &
Sons.
Guo, C., Lv, G., Yang, S. and Wang, J.H., Microsoft Corp, 2014. Virtual data center
allocation with bandwidth guarantees. U.S. Patent 8,667,171.

Wu, J., Teregowda, P., Williams, K., Khabsa, M., Jordan, D., Treece, E., Wu, Z. and Giles,
C.L., 2014, March. Migrating a digital library to a private cloud. In 2014 IEEE International
Conference on Cloud Engineering (pp. 97-106). IEEE.