ITICT205A Virtualisation- technology called Fault Tolerance

Assesment Description

Content and Structure:

Virtualisation solution comparison between Proprietary and open source software in Cloud deployments Virtualisation is not a new technology. It is something from the past. We had Mainframe computers since the 1960s and 1970s, and those computers offered virtualisation through logical partitions and virtual machines (VMs).

Today, companies like VMware, Citrix and Microsoft have developed a proprietary virtualisation software solution using the same concept of abstraction between the hardware layer and the operating system layer which allows us to run more than one operating system on a single hardware device. This technology has many advantages such as server consolidation and enhances resource utilisation, reducing power consumption, improving server management and automation. Virtualisation software such as VMware vSphere provides enhanced features like vMotion live migration to move virtual machines from one hardware to another without turning the VM off, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) utility for resources load balancing across all the computing power and it supports High Availability HA to reduce hardware downtime failure. VMware uses a unique technology called Fault Tolerance (FT) to achieve zero downtime which provides continuous availability to
virtual machines.

In 2010, NASA and Rackspace started a cloud platform project to support Infrastructure as Service IaaS deployment. In 2012, the OpenStack established as an independent body that believed in open source, open design, open development and open community. Today, OpenStack Foundation has more than 500 companies and many communities contributing to one of the most successful open-source projects. This project started with Nova (compute) and Swift (Object Storage) only.

On Victoria release, OpenStack has almost 30 different services which support a wide range of features and many different hypervisors.

In this assignment, you need to compare proprietary virtualisation software such as VMware vSphere to open-source platform such as OpenStack. 

Your comparison should focus on software features, scalability, automation and security vulnerability concerns. To achieve a good mark, you need to focus on one of these areas, dig deeper into your research and show a higher critical analysis level.