Virtualization in an Enterprise Environment

Document Type

Capstone

Advisors

Dr. Jamal Alsabbagh, alsabbaj@gvsu.edu

Embargo Period

8-16-2010

Abstract

Business systems departments often support a testing and production environment to support business needs in a real time environment. Multiple operating systems and configurations are required to adequately test and implement the software needs of a business. Testing, research and development for systems and applications require frequent installation and re-installation. Supporting the kind of growth and change needed by many companies will result in hardware redundancy and less than optimal utilization. Business often invests in expensive server farms for new growth all the while continuing to support legacy systems. The mixed environment poses many challenges for integration. Numerous systems have been designed utilizing virtualization to subdivide the resources of computers. However, some require specialized hardware, or cannot support legacy operating systems. Some target 100% binary compatibility at the expense of performance. Balancing hardware, OS and application requirements with a strong foundation OS establishes a successful virtual environment and can take advantage of the benefits of a virtual environment. These are all the issues that the current IT infrastructure for most organizations faces today. Virtualization is suggested to be a solution that can address most, if not all, of these issues. This paper will review the feasibility of virtualization to address these issues and any additional benefits it may provide.

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