Cloud Virtualization and Management Essay Example

Table of Contents

Help-Desk Alternative

Employees are arguably the biggest strengths of a company. It is their employees who make or break the company. Biggest of innovations and transformations arise out of the workforce that a company employs. It does not matter if the employee is a factory worker or a board member, training and imparting knowledge on Employees is the most forward thinking investments a company could make to secure its future. In the case of this company, the company is going for a transformation wherein core infrastructure and services are upgraded to completely new levels. As a result, the current helpdesk where users look for answers to the problems they might have or to learn about something has proven to be quite restrictive. The company wishes to upgrade this to a whole new level using some new solution.

The ideal solution in this case would be a Learning Management System or LMS. LMS is a much more advanced yet highly capable in solving the problem this company is facing. Learning Management Systems are an integrated solution that provides continuous learning opportunities to the workforce. While a traditional Helpdesk works on the basis of a one-way communication, an LMS works in a two-way communication wherein employees not only interact with instructors but also with each other. This is key to an effective learning and training solution by facilitating communication among the business leaders of the company and the various departments of the workforce as well as the instructors. It does this by providing continuous learning opportunities through delivery of learning events, web-based training, traditional classroom sessions, formal and informal learning activities, grading and tracking of each of the employees, exams among other things. At the same time, the learning experience for the employees can be personalized to give a precise coaching that ultimately not only helps the company in this transformation but also in the future. The benefits of a LMS over a traditional Helpdesk is as follows:

• Improved Performance: Targeted learning experience based on organization goals can be delivered quickly and effectively to complete or a part of the workforce helping with business performance and also fostering with employee development and engagement.

• Achieve Integration: Integration with company’s traditional knowledgebase and educational resources.

• Cost-effective: By streamlining the entire learning process and administrative abilities provides for a reduced cost of delivering learning and tracking.

Virtualization

Virtualization is the development of a ‘Virtualized’ system that acts as an actual system. The virtual system could be an operating system, a server system, a storage system or a network system (Shen, 2015). Virtualization allows companies to create a complete virtual environment to run on a traditional platform as a guest without having to interrupt or interfere the host. There are a variety of types of Virtualization available:

Operating system virtualization

Operating system virtualization is a virtualization type wherein an entire operating system would be virtualized. This means that a ‘Virtual’ Operating system would run on top of a traditional operating system that would have almost all the capabilities of the underlying operating system (Lee, 2013). It can be run either in an isolated manner or an integrated manner with the existing system. Also, not one, but multiple operating systems can run on top of another and at the same time, there isn’t a need of another operating system to exists underneath and the same can be run without an operating system while just utilizing a capable Hypervisor. This benefits companies to test, debug, deploy and ultimately save costs for extra machine, power management and hardware components (Lee, 2013).

Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization is a very basic form of virtualization in-use by many companies without having the knowledge that they are actually using it. In its most basic form, a VLAN created on a small network can be called as Network Virtualization. Two or more virtual networks could be created in the same physical network and they ultimately operate in their own logical network wherein each of the logical network has a different set of processes and functions to perform. Network virtualization are two types: Internal and External.

Internal: It provides a proper network like functionality but to one system.

External: It combines many different works or various parts of the networks into one virtual unit.

Hardware Virtualization

A hardware virtualization is a type of virtualization wherein one processor acts as a several different processors. The users can ultimately run different operating systems on the same hardware or in other cases more than one user would be able to use that same processor at the same time.

Storage Virtualization

In storage virtualization, various different storages spread across different networks are used a single storage for efficient and easier management of such resources. It provides different advantages and there are two types of Storage Virtualization, Block and File. In Block virtualization, multiple storage devices are consolidated in one single physical storage device. This benefits administrator, such as in cases of Load Balancing, Speed and Performance optimization. On the other hand, File virtualization is the virtualization of File or directory stored on a hard drive within a data centre. It could be located in a data centre across the globe.

Virtualization benefits and disadvantages to the organization:

Advantages

• Investments: Virtualization helps companies spend less money on hardware and resources as they require fewer resources, network hardware among other things resulting in saving on hardware and energy consumption.

• Backup and disaster recovery: Virtualized systems are easier to backup and usually are backed up to the last second and at the same time are quick to recover from any unprecedented attack such as physical or logical attacks.

• Efficiency: IT operations are more efficient as the process of testing, debugging, deploying software, maintaining software and hardware are quick and streamlined.

Disadvantages

• Virtualization requires high upfront costs in purchasing hardware required for virtualization.

• Virtualization has issues with performance although latest Hypervisors have overcome this issue to great extent.

• Virtualization has problem with scalability as well as availability.

SDN vs PBN and Recommendation for the company

Software Defined Networking or SDN is a method of networking using software alternative instead of a specialized hardware. It has some additional benefit over it such as it allows easier management of dynamic networks. Software defined networking also offers other possibilities such as virtualizing only a part of the network instead of entire network infrastructure. The main goal of SDN is to provide network admins to respond quickly towards changing business requirements through a centralized console (Martinussen, 2013). SDN encompasses different types of network technologies making it more agile and support virtualized server. An added advantage is that SDN is quite flexible and agile and adapt to transformational changes easily. On the other hand, a Policy based network management is a combination of different services and rules that defines criteria for the usage and access of resources. A policy is a combination of different rules. Each of this rule is a combination of different conditions and a condition corresponding that action (Keliiaa and Ernest, 2005). An added advantage of Policy Based Networking is the fact that it offers a high-degree of automation over a range of different system devices. However, for the choice of this organization, SDN would be the ideal choice as the company is going through a transformational change and cannot invest much time in defining every single policy and the complete conditions. This would also make it more rigid as there would be less scope of changes thereby making it more rigid. On the other hand, SDN is quite flexible and agile and is directly programmable without having to go through a series of policies.

References

. 1st ed. [ebook] Available at: http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2004/043254.pdf [Accessed 28 May 2017].Policy Based Network Management Keliiaa, C. and Ernest, M. (2005).

. 1st ed. [ebook] Available at: http://dsc.soic.indiana.edu/publications/virtualization.pdf [Accessed 28 May 2017].Virtualization Basics: Understanding Techniques and Fundamentals Lee, H. (2013).

. 1st ed. [ebook] Available at: http://www.cisco.com/web/europe/ciscoconnect2013/pdf/DC_3_SDN.pdf [Accessed 28 May 2017].Introduction to Software Defined Networks (SDN) and its relevance in the DC Martinussen, B. (2013).

. 1st ed. [ebook] Available at: http://dsc.soic.indiana.edu/publications/virtualization.pdf [Accessed 28 May 2017].Introduction to Virtualization Shen, Q. (2015).