Virtualisation Performance Evaluation | nursing homework essays
Detail of the task:
Overview
For this assignment, you are being asked to design a hybrid cloud solution and provide an evaluation of the overhead of virtualisation for TransLine Shipping Ltd, a medium sized shipping management organisation. You should read the scenario to understand the requirements of the hybrid cloud design. Your evaluation of virtualisation overhead will consider several benchmarks running under different levels of virtualisation.
Scenario
TransLine Shipping Ltd are a UK based container shipping management company with a global client base. Transline primarily act as a broker between customers that are looking for container slots on ships and the shipping companies that have capacity to carry containers. TransLine operators are continually checking for availability and booking slots to resell as and when they are released by the shipping companies. TransLine resell slots using a restful API that is used by customers 24/7. To support their operations TransLine have a small IT team that take care of several servers located at their head office in Leeds. The company have been growing and the directors believe it is time to move some infrastructure to the cloud, but still maintain some IT functions at their Leeds office. At present the company have the following main pieces of equipment located at their head office:
Qty Device
3 10gb Ethernet Switch 24 ports
15 Dell PowerEdge R620 with 1 x Intel Xeon E5-2640 @ 2.5Ghz, 256GB of DDR3 and 2TB of raid 5 storage. Tape backup unit.
2 Cisco ASA 5510 firewall.
In total the company have fifteen servers. Of these, thirteen are being used to host individual applications used by the organisation e.g. Accounts software, file servers etc. The organisations web service is hosted on the remaining two. The service is made up of a http web service backed by a mongo database server. There are approximately 100 pc systems on site and approximately 50 staff working remotely via vpn to the cisco ASA firewalls. The company are in the process of an IT refresh, and they think it is a good time to virtualise the thirteen application servers and run them on an in-house cloud/virtualised environment. They would like to reduce the number of physical servers but maintain a level of HA so that if a server fails there will be no failure or impact to the virtual machine performance.
The company feels that it is time to move the web service out of the office. Recently, due in part to an increase in business, they have found that the web service has had difficulty servicing all requests with a reasonable latency. They would prefer to host the web service in the cloud and would like the service to provide HA and autoscaling features. At present each of the servers are backed up to tape, the organisation would instead like to use a cloud service to backup all servers, so if the company experience a site failure the virtual machines could be recovered. The on-premise system should have a new firewall specified that will enable connectivity to the cloud system, enabling staff to update the database backend for the web service.
Task 1) Hybrid Cloud design
You should read the scenario and provide a hybrid cloud design that will meet the customers’ requirements. This should be documented in the form of a report to the CTO of TransLine Shipping Ltd. The report should contain the following sections:
a) On premise design – This section should contain several diagrams that depict your suggested on- premises virtualisation solution. Each diagram should have associated text that details and justifies the approach. The diagrams should show the platform details e.g. storage, server and network topology and show the arrangement of the virtual resources. The design should take into consideration the physical server specification that will be replaced and the requirements that the solution should continue to operate in the event of a hypervisor, storage, or switch failure.
b) Cloud design – In this section you should present a solution to the cloud hosted requirements of the IT refresh. This includes the hosting of the web service and cloud backup of the onsite resources. The solution should provide HA and be capable of autoscaling to meet demand. You should consider how the cloud environment is connected to the on-premise solution. Several diagrams showing the arrangement of the virtual services that make up your solution should be provided e.g. IaaS components, FaaS, PaaS or Kubernetes. It is important that you consider security in the design of the system.
c) Virtualisation critical evaluation – You should provide a critical evaluation of the benefits provided by the virtualisation types that have been deployed in your design. You should include a section that details the possible advantages of moving all of the company’s infrastructure to the cloud. Specifically you should address the costs of on-premise vs cloud.
The diagrams for part a and b should be placed in an appendix and are not included in the page count.
Task 2) Virtualisation Evaluation
Virtualisation will incur an overhead, however the flexibility provided will usually outweigh the cost of the overhead. The owners of TransLine would like you to provide an evaluation of the overhead of virtualisation for the types they intend to deploy during the IT refresh. To perform the evaluation you are being asked to identify four benchmark applications and run all under the following virtualisation configurations.
• Bare metal (within the operating system outside of a VM)
• Virtual Machine
• Virtual Machine with virtualisation extensions enabled.
• Inside a Qemu aarch64 emulation running inside a virtual machine
• Inside a container within a Virtual Machine
• Inside a container within a Virtual Machine with virtualisation extensions enabled You should provide a graph showing your results along with an evaluation of your findings.
What you should hand in
One report that details your hybrid cloud design along with the results and evaluation of your virtualisation experiments:
Task 1)
A) Design of the on-premises virtualisation platform. To include diagrams and a description of the approach taken, detailing how the design meets the requirements of the organisation.
B) Design of the cloud platform identifying the provider and services selected. Diagrams should be included e.g. IaaS layout showing load balancers, network zones and virtual machines. If you are using Kubernetes or containers, you should depict this in an additional diagram.
C) A critical review of virtualisation deployed in the solution, focusing on the overhead costs and the benefits of flexibility in deployment, high availability, and scalability.
Task 2)
This section should contain several graphs detailing the results of your virtualisation experiments. Each graph should have an accompanying evaluation, linking key technical details that impact the results observed. You should conduct wider reading to identify methods that could reduce the overheads observed.
Your report should be no longer than 12 pages (excluding title, contents, references and appendix).
Marking Scheme/Assessment Criteria
Task Assessment Criteria % Weighting
1 Hybrid Cloud design 65
1a On-premise design 25
1b Cloud design 25
1c Critical review of virtualisation benefits 15
2 Virtualisation Performance Evaluation 35
Sample Solution
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