SoftArc Engineering is a civil engineering firm company which works across Australia as well as in Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea. SoftArc Engineering currently has a small self-managed data centre that has the following servers:
2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2012 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD). These servers are used for authentication and authorisation;
3 x SQL Server 11.0 (2012) database servers on Windows Server 2012 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 500GB RAID-5 array). These servers are used for database operations for Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and their Client Design application;
1 x Exchange 2013 email server on Windows Server 2012 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
4 x Windows Server 2016 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
1 x SharePoint 2013 server on Windows Server 2012 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 16GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
1 x Client Design and CRM application server on Windows Server 2016 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
2 x Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7.1 (2015) servers running Apache TomCat v. 7.0 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).
1 x Cisco 5505 ASA Firewall v9.3 (2014)
The board have been advised to retire most of their old physical servers and start moving their operations onto a virtual platform. You have been employed to advise the board on various aspects of virtualisation.
Your Report
You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the board of SoftArc. Your report should include:
A one page executive summary,
Your proposed virtual infrastructure for the data centre. This is to include:
Which virtual technology (VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, etc) you recommend to be deployed, along with your detailed and referenced reasons for that recommendation,
A discussion of the technical infrastructure proposed including:
Number and type of hosts required including CPU, RAM and internal storage requirements
Host clustering requirements and number of VMs expected to be hosted on the cluster,
Storage requirements (external to servers), including how this storage will be presented to VMs,
Additional network requirements to support this infrastructure.
A discussion of how you would deliver virtual desktops to all users using the new infrastructure.