Network Design Assignment 3

Scenario

“Over 2 billion people will be viewing the Cricket World Cup which will be played in Australia and New Zealand in 2015. Your job is to evaluate how virtualised server infrastructure can be used to provide a system capable of providing media content to a large worldwide audience, and scale as demand changes.”

 

Load Balancing is a computer networking method to distribute workload across multiple computers. Using multiple components with load balancing instead of a single computer may increase reliability through redundancy.

Load balancing methods are determined by distributed incoming requests. Having load balancing prevents server fail over; if a server goes down all other traffic gets transferred to working server so content is still provided to the users.

 

High availability is a system approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of performance will be met during a contractual measurement period. Globally-distributing your virtual servers across different geographical centres can provide you the stability and application up time as high as possible.

Given the scenario, having lots of virtualised server and configuring it to round robin setup will help balance the load on the servers when multiple users try to watch cricket world cup. So when a user tries to send request, the request gets balanced between servers whereas going to one particular server causing it to overload. Having virtualised servers also saves costs then having to buy each server and maybe later we don’t need them. Having this setup helps increase reliability and keeps contents alive for long period of time.

 

Microsoft Sysprep is a technology that comes with windows by default, technology that can be used with other deployment tools to install Microsoft windows operating system with minimal intervention by an administrator. System preparation prepares windows installation for imaging, allowing you to capture a customized installation. It removes pc-specific information from a windows installation generalizing the installation so it can make additional changes or updates to the image file. It removes PC’s security identifier (SID), this allows you to capture the image and apply it to other PCs.

Sysprep is mostly used in large organisations where they have multiple client computer which needs to be setup and the most easiest way to do this is prep up one client computer with all the OS, drivers and all the software to be installed. After this process has finished we can use Sysprep that is built into Microsoft CD installation clone the whole image. We can use Ghosting software for example (can be different programs), get the image we prepped and deploy on multiple clients at once through the network.

Using Sysprep, administrators on large network doesn’t have to go each client and manually install the OS and applications. Sysprep is only available in Microsoft versions of OS.

 

Virtual Servers a virtual server is a server that shares the same resources (hardware and Software) from a dedicated server. They been used as they are more cost-effective and provide faster resource control.

Capacity on demand is a purchasing option that allows companies to receive equipment with more computer processing, storage, or other capacity than the company needs in the time of purchase. This extra capacity remaining unused for until the company actually requires it.

For example, a company need 6 core processor but at the time of purchase that would be fine for the current requirement but capacity on demand, the vendor provides the additional capacity hoping that the company expands, they won’t look somewhere else but simply take advantage of the available capacity. This also helps vendors keep their customers in the loop and businesses also benefit from this outcome as they don’t have to spend money again. Capacity on demand provides the ability to bring new capacity on-line and quickly. Processors and memory can be activated dynamically without interrupting the system or partition operations. Capacity on demand refers to paying for extra processing power as need later on.

 

Horizontal server scaling is adding more servers to your application to spread the load. Increasing the number of nodes/server in the cluster reduces the responsibilities of each member node by spreading the key space wider and providing additional endpoints for client connections. The capacity of each n ode doesn’t change, but its load is decreased. Some reasons scaling horizontally is reducing the load and increasing disk capacity.

 

 

Vertical server scaling improving the number of nodes/server gives greater capacity to the node but does not decrease the overall load on the existing members of the cluster. Adding more processors and storage to a symmetric multiple processing to extend processing capability, generally this form of scaling employs only one instance of operation system.

 

 

 

Configure DNS on Control Server

  1. First Setup a Static IP by going to network interface and IPV4 properties
  2. Navigate to Manage Your Server
  3. Click on Add or Remove a role
  4. A wizard will pop up and choose DNS Server and follow the setup. (Note: might need to insert the server 2003 disc).
  5. After finishing the setup, new link will show up in Manage Your Server (Manage this DNS server) click on it.
  6. New window pops up, navigate to Forward Lookup Zone, drop the minus bar down there will be a DNS name, click on that.
  7. Now we need to use a script to automatically add Dynamic DNS records for the web servers. (DNSCMD and Psexec).