Riverina Pharmaceutical Ltd is a regional Australian pharmaceutical company that delivers pharmaceutical supply chain services to a number of nursing care facilities in regional Australia. The company has some 100 staff, which includes management, administrative staff and other pharmaceutical staff. Riverina Pharmaceutical has a small data centre at its main site at Wagga Wagga where the company’s servers and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure at its data centre:

• 2x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2;
• 3x MySQL database servers on Windows Server 2008 R2;
• 1x Exchange 2007 Email Server on Windows Server 2008 R2;
• 4x Windows Server 2003 File and Print Servers;
• 2x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux Server running Apache and TomCat.

The management of the company is concerned about the increasing costs of power and cooling to operate their data centre. The management also wants to increase the reliability of the services, reduce the desktop support loads and accelerate desktop provisioning to the staff. They are investigating whether they should employ a virtualisation technology in their data centre to enhance the data centre efficiency while keeping the cost low. They are also considering whether they should use virtualisation to provide an updated desktop environment to their staff.

The Challenge

You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the management. Your report should include:

• One page executive summary
• Proposed virtual infrastructure for the data centre including which virtual technology is recommended and the reasons for that recommendation
• Analysis of how virtual applications and desktops or both will be delivered to the user’s desktops.
• Design disaster recovery / backup system
• Information security changes required and the steps required to implement / monitor these changes
• Final approximate price for your proposal

Rationale

This assessment item is designed to assess the understanding and use of some advanced topics in virtualisation, analytical skills, planning and design capabilities of students under some predefined requirements. In particular, the assessment covers the following learning objectives:

• be able to communicate the importance of different virtualisation technologies for x86 and Unix based systems;
• be able to evaluate which virtualisation technology should be used in a given set of requirements;
• be able to identify and evaluate the requirements to create a virtual infrastructure; and
• be able to analyse the requirements for management of a virtual infrastructure.