RECENT ASSIGNMENT

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. The company also owns the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public. The company also owns Regional Garden Planners, which is a small company that 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 2012, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD);
• 3 x SQL Server 2012 database servers on Windows Server 2012 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 12GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array);
• 1 x MS Exchange Server 2013 email server on Windows Server 2012 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 4 x Windows Server 2012 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 6 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).

The company has some 150 staff, who include management, administrative staff, nursery and Regional Garden Planners staff. The company has a range of different types of relatively old personal computers, which run Windows XP, to connect to the company data centre. These computers will need to be updated in the near future.
The directors of Regional Gardens Ltd are concerned about the increasing costs of power and cooling to operate their data centre and they are investigating whether they should employ a virtualization technology in their data centre. They are also considering whether they should use virtualisation to provide an updated desktop environment to their staff.
You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the directors of Regional Gardens Ltd. Your report should include:
1. A one (1) page Executive Summary that describes the main points of your report (10 marks);
2. A description of the proposed virtual infrastructure for the data centre, including which virtualisation technology is recommended and the reasons for that recommendation (40 marks);
3. A description of how virtual applications or desktops (or both) will be delivered to the user’s desktops (10 marks);
4. A description of how you will provide disaster recovery in this infrastructure (20 marks);
5. A discussion of the information security changes required in this environment and the steps taken to monitor and control these changes (20 marks).

Your argument must be supported by references to academic and/or practitioner literature. All references must be in APA 6th edition format.