Task: Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These...

Task:

Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large
display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include
the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional
Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services.
Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data centre at its main site in Bathurst where the company’s servers
and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure:


2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ,
8GB RAM, 140GB HDD);


3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB
RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array);


1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB
RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);

4 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB
RAID-1 array

2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ,

16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).


The management of the company is concerned about the increasing costs of power and cooling to
operate their data centre. The management also wants to increase the reliability of the services, reduce
their desktop support loads and accelerate desktop provisioning to the staff. They are also investigating whether they should employ a virtualisation technology in their data centre to enhance data centre efficiency while keeping costs low. They are considering whether they should also use virtualisation to provide an updated desktop environment to their staff.