Question

Imagine that you are Chris Configurator, a network administrator for the ABC Company. Your organization is expecting a fiscal year of limited financial resources. You have been asked by the Director of Network Operations to develop a set of recommendations as to how virtualization and network optimization methods could be used as a way to meet the growing demands for use of network services while also controlling the cost of expansion of network infrastructure. Discuss the elements of your plan to use virtualization and network optimization techniques as well as remote monitoring to meet the needs of your organization.

Answer 1

As per the scenario, it is my responsibility to setup the infrastructure for ABC company. Actually, virtualization is a great solution to address the cost effectiveness. Using virtualization, many servers can be easily created from a single hardware resource. This actually could serve the request for many servers. Using a VMware license we can able to create as many as VMs we require for the infrastructure. Moreover, I don't have to provision multiple server as it virtualization can save lots of money. So, at first I will provision all the necessary servers in the VMware Workstation and put the servers into NAT such that they can able to communicate with each other as well as the outside world. The DHCP VM should provide IP address to the existing server.

Coming to the monitoring of the network and the health of the servers, I could use monitoring tool like Nagios or Thruk to get the status of the server as well as the health of the servers. Moreover, one of the monitoring servers should installed with Wireshark for capturing the packets entering into the infrastructure. This will actually help in getting an overview of the traffic hitting the servers.