Research Paper: Server Virtualization - Strictly zero plagiarism/ 24 hours

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Virtualization Technology 7

Virtualization Technology

Organization Preparedness for virtualization

Nible LLC is a privately owned company in Chicago that specializes in manufacturing semiconductors. It has over 600 employees, an in-house data center, and 150 desktop computers. It has its headquarters in Chicago. The desktop computers are connected to the local area network via Ethernet cables. Seven of its employees work in the IT department. Some of their duties involve protecting IT assets from intrusions, maintaining IT systems, performing systems upgrades, and providing technical support to other employees. The company's strategic plan, unveiled recently by the CEO, seeks to acquire new markets through mergers and acquisitions. The company's annual revenue is between $ 50 million &70 million, and it is profitable. To meet the increasing demand for their products, Nibble LLC's top management is deploying virtualization technology to improve their productivity, increase efficiency, enhance customer data privacy, increase collaboration, gain a competitive advantage, reduce IT infrastructure costs and increase their agility.

Through virtualization, Nibble LLC will increase its flexibility, scalability, performance, availability of resources, automating operations, and simultaneously create significant cost savings for IT expenses. Virtualized environments are easy to manage and operate. Leveraging the power of vitalization will lead to increased responsiveness to customer requests, business continuity, enhanced resiliency disaster recovery process, simplified data management, and greater efficiency (Lu et al., 2018). By deploying virtualization technology, the company will only maximize server capacity total, reduce downtimes, partition and run different operating systems on a single server, and help the company realize its return on investment. In addition, with virtualization, the organization will provide energy savings as it is an environmentally friendly system (Lu et al., 2018).

IBM licensing for virtualized environment

Businesses that use virtualization technology must pay their service provider for each virtual processor core that is placed on the virtual machines. Users can use "The IBM licensing metric tool to calculate the number of virtual cores deployed on their network. The number of virtual cores is comparable to the number of VPCs utilized by the software. Paying less than when the machine is running at full capacity is an advantage of deploying workloads in a virtualized environment. Although the IBM Power Systems Power VM virtualization technology provides a lot of flexibility, it also makes assessing software license needs more difficult (Salapura, 2018). Many IBM products include user- or capacity-based licensing. The capacity-based licensing approach is used for products with server components. All of the physical server's active processing cores are used for IBM's total capacity license. Users can combine their infrastructure and drastically cut their expenses by using sub-capacity licensing. Additionally, sub-capacity licensing enables users to share processors via dynamic resource reallocation and micro-partitioning.

Businesses with a growing client base are given the freedom to decide how to expand their workload environment "without compromising on hardware and software licenses" (Salapura, 2018). Users must license PVU-based apps for less than the whole processor core capacity when using sub-capacity licensing. Sub-capacity virtualization licensing bases the cost of the license on the number of PVUs, which is a measure of processing capacity. IBM licenses a smaller portion of the physical server's virtual capacity as part of the overall capacity licensing (Salapura, 2018). Both passport advantage express and passport advantage customers can use sub capacity licensing in IBM.

Configuration for shared storage

Modern computing environments are shifting towards shared virtualized environments. The benefit of shared storage in a virtual environment is that users have flexible access to vast resources, better utilization of their existing IT infrastructures, and the ability to scale based on their demands (Nett, 2018). In virtualized environments, customers are provided with tools to monitor the resources and performance metrics of the virtual machines. Logical partitions must be set up beforehand using the hardware management console before shared storage can be established. Additionally, logical partitions should have at least 4 GB of storage capacity and at least one physical CPU with entitlement. "Associated rootvg device requires VIOS version 2.2.2.0 or later installation" (Nett, 2018). The shared cluster's San-based physical storage need to be accessible to VIOs' logical partitions. A physical adapter or an Ethernet network should be used to connect VIOS to the local area network. A suitable number of virtual SCSI adapter connections must be configured for each logical client partition to correspond to the virtual server SCSI adapter connections of the necessary VIOS logical partitions (Nett, 2018).

The physical volume for the physical storage and another physical volume for the shared storage pool should be supplied after the cluster has been created. Cluster communication is carried by via repository physical storage. The physical storage pool should have more than 20 GB of accessible storage space, while the repository disk storage space should be at least 2 GB of the total capacity. The shared storage pool is then linked to each VIOS in the clusters, and physical storage is mapped to that partition (Nett, 2018). Failure group disks will be made for redundancy reasons. High availability and reliability will be ensured if one or more disks in the storage pool fail through the use of disk mirroring across many disks in a tier. In case of failure, a notification will be sent from the management console, replacing the failed disk with a functional one (Nett, 2018).

Windows Azure capabilities for virtual machines, IaaS, hybrid cloud, and storage capabilities

Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of cloud services like storage, IaaS, analytics, and networking. Various types of virtual machines are provided in Microsoft Azure based on storage capacity, memory, and compute types. Before creating a virtual machine in an Azure environment, it is necessary to check application workloads and select a virtual machine based on available types (Soh, 2020). Examples of virtual machines available in Azure cloud include; GPU, high-performance compute, memory-optimized, compute-optimized, and general-purpose. The compute-optimized VM provides a high CPU-to-memory ratio and is suitable for web servers with medium traffic, batch processing, and network appliance (Soh, 2020).

On the other hand, the general-purpose VM can be utilized for testing and developing databases for medium-traffic web servers. These virtual machines include DS, D, A0-7, and Dv3. Memory-optimized VM is commonly used in in-memory analytics, relational databases, and medium to large caches. Storage optimized VM are suitable for SQL, big data, and NoSQL databases (Soh, 2020).

Virtual machines with efficient storage can provide up to 32 virtual CPUs. On the other hand, virtual machines that have been GPU (graphics processing unit) optimized have good graphic performance. Additionally, Microsoft Azure offers IaaS, which may dramatically lower maintenance expenses, save money on hardware purchases, and deliver real-time data for the enterprise (Soh, 2020). Additionally, IaaS gives consumers the necessary flexibility to scale up or down IT resources in response to demand. Additionally, they improve the dependability of your underlying infrastructure and assist you in swiftly provisioning new applications. Because the resource is made available as a distinct service and customers only pay for what they use, Azure IaaS enables consumers and businesses to avoid the challenges of maintaining physical servers. Microsoft Azure offers the company scalable storage, high-performance computation, and robust block storage for virtual machines in terms of storage capacities.

Reference

Lu, H. K., Lin, P. C., Chiang, C. H., & Cho, C. A. (2018, April). A study of factors affecting the adoption of server virtualization technology. In Ninth International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2017) (Vol. 10615, p. 106155L). International Society for Optics and Photonics. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9080029/

Salapura, V., & Harper, R. (2018). Virtual Machine Resiliency Management System for the Cloud. IEEE Cloud Computing, 5(3), 55-64. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8383657/

Nett, N. S., Arroyo, R. X., Nguyen, T., Mashak, B. W., Zgabay, R. M., Nguyen, H., ... & Anderl, W. J. (2018). IBM POWER9 systems are designed for commercial, cognitive, and cloud. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 62(4/5), 7-1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8458311/

Soh, J., Copeland, M., Puca, A., & Harris, M. (2020). Overview of Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Services. In Microsoft Azure (pp. 21-41). Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-5958-0_2