Virtualized Environment Vs Physical Environment

Instruction:

2 Pages Double-Spaced based on research findings/interviews, and MUST cite in text citations using APA format. Please use the following criteria to develop the assignment:

Based on the results found, practical guidelines are developed for practitioners and/or researchers. Discussion should talk about contributions of this project to the information systems community and additional suggestions for future research. Finally, a brief summary of the project should also be provided.

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1. How long have you been working in the IT Field? In the roles of development, testing, deployment, or Help Desk?

Job Title:  PC Applications Analyst

Department:  PC Application Support

RESPONSE:  1-3 Years in the role of development, testing, and deployment

Job Title:  PC LAN Administrator

Department:  PC Technical Support

RESPONSE:  5+ Years in the role of deployment

Job Title:  Teleprocessing Analyst

Department:  Teleprocessing

RESPONSE:  3-5 Years in the role of deployment and Help Desk

Job Title: PC Technical Support Officer

Department: PC Technical Support

            RESPONSE: 5+ Years in the roles of development, testing and deployment.

2. What is your experience level working with Virtualization technologies? Were these experiences gained through a structured training program (degree), certification, hands-on operation, or special projects such as completing system upgrades to mitigate issues?

Job Title:  PC Applications Analyst

Department:  PC Application Support

RESPONSE:  Novice. I gained my experience while in a degree program, while completing a few hands on projects that involved virtualization technologies.

Job Title:  PC LAN Administrator

Department:  PC Technical Support

RESPONSE:  Proficient. I gained my experience through certification and hands-on operations.

Job Title:  Teleprocessing Analyst

Department:  Teleprocessing

RESPONSE:  Novice. I gained my experience through hands-on operations and through a degree program.

Job Title: PC Technical Support Officer

Department: PC Technical Support

            RESPONSE: Expert. I gained my experience through certification in VMware and through hands-on operations.

3. Based on your level of experience working with virtualization technologies, do you believe that virtualized environments have more reliability for back-up recovery over physical environments? Are there log files, user feedback, or formally documented system issues and complaints that can attest to your answer to the above question? If so, please describe briefly.

Job Title:  PC Applications Analyst

Department:  PC Application Support

RESPONSE:  No, this is just based on what I have learned and heard about virtualization technology and how businesses in general have implemented this environment. Since a virtual environment can be very complex and have multiple storage areas, it can be very difficult to implement a proficient back-up recovery. This then leads to a more complex configuration and many companies do not plan their back-up recoveries properly.

Job Title:  PC LAN Administrator

Department:  PC Technical Support

RESPONSE:  Yes, not from the perspective that restoring a physical machine isn’t reliable, but more along the lines that running virtualized servers offer more flexible backup and restore options that tend to be more reliable.

Job Title:  Teleprocessing Analyst

Department:  Teleprocessing

RESPONSE:  Yes, based on my own personal experience trying to restore database backups from a virtual server compared to a physical server makes it much easier to do.

Job Title: PC Technical Support Officer

Department: PC Technical Support

            RESPONSE: Yes, I have been deploying virtual servers for the past 5 years in the organization and from personal experience, believe that virtualized environments do have better reliability for back-up recovery over physical environments. In addition, if a hardware component of the physical server breaks, then it takes the entire server down whereas with virtualized servers do not have this issue. I have been involved with the past 3 years of disaster recovery testing scenarios and those servers that are virtualized are a lot faster to bring back up compared to physical servers.

4. For large data-sensitive organizations such as financial institutions, healthcare institutions and government agencies, would you recommend virtualized environments over physical environments? Are there any incidents are your places of employment encourage/discourage further deployment of virtualization technologies? If so, please describe briefly.

Job Title:  PC Applications Analyst

Department:  PC Application Support

RESPONSE:  Yes, in general virtualization technology is far more proficient and cost effective compared to physical environments with the proper planning and configuration. For a data-sensitive company, virtualization provides for a faster recovery time in case of a disaster, which allows the company to get up and running quicker. No incidents that I can personally think of.

Job Title:  PC LAN Administrator

Department:  PC Technical Support

RESPONSE:  Yes, virtualization offers many cost saving, time saving and performance related benefits over running physical environments. Just a few examples of this are creating baseline templates for deploying machines. Keeping all of the base operating systems and base-installed software uniform has many benefits from deploying a new server, application compatibility, and restoring backups. Having a uniform virtualized hardware platform and operating system keeps configurations from becoming more complex than they need to be and saves time to focus on mission critical tasks rather than troubleshooting hardware pr0oblems or custom configurations that typically exist on physical environments.

Job Title: Teleprocessing Analyst

Department:  Teleprocessing

            RESPONSE: Yes, I would recommend virtualized environments over physical environments for space saving reasons, cost savings as well as their ability to recover a backup more efficiently and fast. No incidents that I can personally think of.

Job Title:  PC Technical Support Officer

Department:  PC Technical Support

RESPONSE:  Yes, I would whole-heartily recommend virtualized environments over physical environments especially for data-sensitive organizations.  These examples of large data-sensitive organizations need to be able to recover from backup very fast in case of a disaster or other issue in order to get back up and running and conducting business. Without financial institutions, hospitals, or the government, the world could come to a screeching halt if certain data and information was not able to be recovered in a timely manner due to a disaster. Working in a bank, our customers want the ability to access their accounts 24/7 to check balances, pay bills, withdraw money etc. and if they are not able to conduct these transactions for a long period, they could become upset and take their business elsewhere, thus causing the company to lose its customers and their money.

Currently, almost 60% of our server infrastructure is running on virtualized environments and we are in the processing of converting more physical servers over to virtualized with the hope of having above 80% virtualized by the end of 2014.

Two of these interviews were conducted by one-on-one conversations while the other two interviews were conducted during a training session. Each of the individuals that participated in research interview questions is employed in a distinct IT department at Dollar Bank, Federal Savings Bank in Pittsburgh, PA and is recognized as the largest independent mutual savings bank in the United States.