Enterprise Virtualization Implementation Proposal (170 points)

Recently, you have been hired as a Virtualization Administrator for a solar panel manufacturing company. While the company is in Denver, the growth of the industry has prompted them to offer their services nations wide. Their current Information Technology infrastructure in their local data center consists of the following physical hardware:

• Three domain controllers with a Single Forest Single Domain Active Directory model,
• Three Microsoft Exchange servers,
• Ten web servers,
• Five application servers,
• Eight database servers,
• Hardware-based load balancer,
• Firewalls,
• Routers and switches, and
• VoIP infrastructure.

The Information Technology staff is limited to developers, a database administrator, network administrator, help desk support staff, and a network engineer.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the company is worried that with the rapid expansion of the business, the current hardware will not support the required computing power. The CIO estimated that at least 15 to 20 servers (web, application, database) will be needed. Due to space and cooling issues in the data center, you have been tasked to develop a plan for virtual technology. As a Virtualization Administrator, it is your job to come up with a plan that meets the business requirements.

Your proposal should include the following criteria and the reasoning behind your choices:

• A description of the importance of virtualization,
• A description of the architecture of a popular hypervisor,
• Recommendations for a virtual machine solution,
• Recommendations for virtual machine configurations,
• Recommendations for the best approach for deploying applications in a virtual environment, and
• Proposal for a design layout of the data center infrastructure environment through the use of server virtualization.

Deliverable:

Your APA-formatted proposal should be between 8-10 pages in length, not including the title and reference page(s).