Traditional Digital Infrastructure

traditionalistic digital baseIntroductionAs prison term goes on, our clubs argon expected to feed much and more of an online presence. This is especi on the wholey unbent for those university organizations that ar technology oriented. People expect us to have our take website, email, calendar and early(a) withdraw. traditionally, having all these services hindquarters be expensive and quantify consuming. However, using virtualization, m whatsoever of these problems can be mitigated. In this account we will discuss the problems faced by university organizations (thus giving us critereon for our solution), and fling through the outmatch solution for virtualization. After reading this paper, you will fi the best solution for your specific organization.Problem With Having A Traditional Digital InfrastructureYou may non think it affects your organization, just now increasingly it is expected of us to have digital infrastructures. Part of maintaining a professional or ganization or student organi- zation with credibility is having an online presence (websites, emails, calendars, and so on. This faces us with many new problems that be with having a digital infrastructure bell, time contended, complexity, and security.Cost of Maintaining a Traditional Digital InfrastructureTraditional digital infrastructures require organizations to have soldierys, ne dickensrking capabil- ities, and general domain call offs. Servers can be made out of almost any computer however, for it to be reli commensurate for your users it should be a dedicated and reigning machine. This is usu- ally in the form of a waiter blade which can cost anywhere between $3801 and $45,751.952. Similar costs ar plunge when profaneing networking equipment such as routers, switches, hubs, networking cable, etc. Then to top it all off you need a fully qualified domain make water (FQDN) for people to fi your website and email. This cost is usually minimal usually argon almo st$20 or so. In the end, it all adds up and can be very costly.Time Needed to Setup and Maintain a Traditional Digital InfrastructureNot only if does it cost money to buy equipment, it costs time. The fi thing that has to be done is determining the specifications of the server(s) and networking equipment you need. After your organization has determined this, mortal needs to search the web for the servers and networking equipment that meets these specifications for the lowest price. Then, if your universitys student clubs atomic number 18 organized anything like Virginia Techs, your club needs to request the cash in hand to do so and justify it.Now, you have acquired the server and networking equipment but, that isnt the end of your time commitment. Next step is to set it all up which takes, person who knows what they ar doing, a few days. The servers are all set up and networked it is time to put them on the internet. Someone needs to buy a FQDN, and assume it to the IP addre sses of your servers.After all is said and done, the servers are up and running. However, this is only the beginning. As time goes on you will need to update the servers, fi errors, and variety configurations based on your needs. As you can see, having a traditional digital infrastructure is very time consuming.Complexity Maintaining a Traditional Digital InfrastructureAs stated in the above section, there is rather a bit of maintenance that needs to be done to servers and networking equipment updating, debugging errors, configuring, etc. There are many diff t ways to go round doing these tasks however, they are outside the scope of this paper. No matter the way to get by these tasks, you need to worry about the complexity of these methods. Most methods require close toone who has worked in a command line interface (CLI). Otherwise, it is necessary to fi or build a graphical user interface (GUI) that everyone can understand. fashioning it simple to complete these tasks is impo rtant the officers that take over after you need to be briefed on it. If it is not simple, they will probably not constitute it. It will become broken, no one will use it, or even worse it could be hacked and used for malicious purposes. Simplicity is discern when it comes to victualsing things running smoothly.Securing A Traditional Digital InfrastructureThe fi problem, but not the least important, is securing the digital infrastructure you have created. There are many people out there who would love to have the fountain of your server at their disposal. To keep them from gaining control of your systems it takes time, adds complexity, and may increase costs. Securing them requires someone with the time and mindset to keep up with current vulnerabilities, monitor the systems, keep them updated, and configure them. Therefore this needs to be someone who is either unbidden to learn, or knows what he/she is doing. This is a big and multifaceted area of the digital world, and canno t be delved into in this paper but, it should never be taken lightly.Virtualization The unsanded Digital InfrastructureThere is a better way to go about creating a digital infrastructure virtualization. Virtu- alization allows you to use one server to create many virtual servers within it. All these servers are managed by what are called hypervisors. There are many companies that even put up virtualization in what is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Amazon Web Ser- vices, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and DigitalOcean (to name a few). We will be excluding these from our virtualization solutions in this paper as we are focused on hosting our own digital infrastructures.There are two fictional characters of hypervisors reference 1 and type 2. Type 1 hypervisors run immediately on the hardware of the server whereas, type 2 hypervisors run at heart of an Operating System (OS)3. Type 1 hypervisors allow us to virtualize our services as if they were on their own physical servers an d are largely more efficient than their type 2 counterparts. Type 2 hypervisors on the other hand, usually have well thought-out, and easy-to-use GUIs.As part of our critereon we are sounding to reduce cost, increase fly (decrease com- plexity), and increase security. This is achieved by using type 1 hypervisors which are both efficient in their usage of server resources, but also in their programming itself fewer lines of code essence less vulnerabilities. By using up less resources, we are able to provide more services (or better services) with fewer servers thus operose costs. Out of these type 1 hypervisors, we are looking for the cheapest ones. There are many projects via open source that provide free hypervisors. In addition, some companies have made versions of their en- terprise hypervisors free for people to use/try. This leaves us with a few options at this point KVM, Xen, Citrix XenServer, VMWare ESXi, and Microsoft Hyper-V.The next critereon was the time necessary to frame-up and maintain this digital infrastructure. Naturally by using virtualization we have reduced the number of physical servers to take care of. All of the above hypervisors have large wikis and support communities4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. However, two of these communities VMWares and Microsofts arent as varied as those of the OpenSource community, and moldiness be paid for to get quality customer support. Our second to give out critereon was the complexity of the solution. From personal experience, all three of these solutions are very simple. However, not all three are very fl Citrix XenServer is OpenSource, but requires a host OS of Microsoft origins. This means one would have to have Windows installed on the server. therefore reducing the amount of fl y one has with the configuration of the server. The other two, KVM and Xen, are both OpenSource and Linux based allowing for the most customizability. Xen used to be the best type 1 hypervisor in use, and is still used b y major companies such as AWS13. However, recently Linux has been moving further and further away from Xen. From my experience, it has been comparatively diffi to get an up-to-date version of Xen running on many Linux distros that are supported. This is not a problem, as KVM is absolutely comparable, and was recently added into the Linux kernel. Thus, KVM can be used on any base Linux distro and caneven run Windows OSes, Linux, and with some tweaking Mac OSX.Finally, security is our last critereon. As discussed, the fewer lines of code, patently the more secure the hypervisor is. Looking at Xen and KVM, both have passing small amounts of base code however, KVM, being part of the linux kernel, is smaller. It is also more integrated into the most secure part of the Linux OS, and is thus considered more secure. In addition, both are OpenSource, allowing them to be reviewed by hundreds of thousands of people. Thus security is intrinsic with these two hypervisors.ConclusionUniversity Clubs are requried increasingly to have digital infrastructures for websites, email, and calendars. However, creating and maintaining traditional infrastructures is costly, time consuming, diffi and can be insecure. Virtualization has become the best way for com- panies and clubs to provide a digital infrastructure in the most efficient and cost effective manor. More specifically for clubs, KVM seems to be the best solution, and the easiest to implement on a server.References1 Server Supply, IBM7870G2ABLADECENTERHS22-1XINTELXEONQUAD-COREE5620/2.40GHZ,6GBDDR3RAM,GRAPHICMATROXG200EV,GIGABITETHERNET,BLADESERVER.NEW.INSTOCK., ServerSupply.com, Inc., January 11, 2017.2 Neobits, CiscoUCS-SP7-B200-VCiscoB200M3BladeServer2xIntelXeonE5-2640v2Octa-core(8Core)2GHz128GBInstalledDDR3SDRAMSerialAttachedSCSI(SAS)Controller0,1RAIDLevels2ProcessorSupport768GBRAMSupport10Gigabit, Neobits, Inc., January 11, 2017.3 IBM, Hypervisors,virtualization,andthecloudLearnabouthypervisors,systemvirtu-alization,a ndhowitworksinacloudenvironment, ibm.com, January 11, 2017.4 Debian, KVM, wiki.debian.org, January 11, 2017.5 Canonical, KVM, wiki.ubuntu.com, January 11, 2017.6 Arch, KVM, wiki.archlinux.org, January 11, 2017.7 Xen Project, MainPage, wiki.xen.org, January 11, 2017.8 Citrix, MainPage, wiki.xenserver.org, January 11, 2017.9 Debian, Xen, wiki.debian.org, January 11, 2017.10 Arch, Xen, wiki.archlinux.org, January 11, 2017.11 VMWare, vSphereHypervisor, vmware.com, January 11, 2017.12 Microsoft, Hyper-V, technet.microsoft.com, January 11, 2017.13 eWeek, AmazonRebootsCloudServerstoPatchXenHypervisor, QuinStreet Enter- prise, January 11, 2017.