Cis 332 Discussion 5, 6: Essay Examples

Benefits of Hyper-V:

Scalability and Cost: Hyper-V has a significantly larger scale across Virtual Machines (VMs), Host and Cluster in comparison with the VMware vSphere Hypervisor. The VMware vSphere is designed as a simple entry level product that allows users to experience the benefits of the virtualization platform offered by VMware. In retrospect, this the VMware vSphere has certain restrictions on scalability that require users to purchase one of the advanced solutions offered by VMware at a significant cost. For example, physical memory is capped at 32GB thus limiting scalability and the maximum memory size of virtual machines. The high scalability of Hyper-V at no extra cost while still offering better scaling than even the upgrade versions of VMware vSphere shows that Hyper-V is a worthwhile investment. In fact, Hyper-V by default supports a physical memory of 4TB compared to 32GB in the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and 2TB in the vSphere 5.1 Enterprise plus (upgrade version).
Resilience and High availability of workloads: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V includes Failover Clustering, which helps customers to achieve high scalability using an unequaled number of nodes in a cluster, and VMs per cluster. However, the vSphere Hypervisor by itself does not offer high availability or resiliency features unless customers purchase an upgrade to vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus. Even when upgraded to vSphere 5.1, the cluster sizes are still restricted to 32 nodes and 4000 VMs per cluster. However, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V has a better offering since it supports 64 nodes and 8000 VMs per cluster.

Improvements to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 from Windows Server 2008:

More secure Multitenancy: In multi-tenant environments, cloud users have a lot of security concerns where data residing in a shared computer system or database is considered more vulnerable to exposure. This exposure can be due to security bugs or intrusions which allow users from other companies to access your hosted data. Windows Server 2008 allowed one to isolate two VMs via server virtualization but did not completely isolate the network layer in a data center. However, Windows Server 2012 server virtualization covers the both VMs and the datacenter’s network layer thus allowing users to restrict access to VMs when while also isolating allocated storage and network resources.
Private Virtual Local Area Network (PVLAN): Windows Server 2012 supports PVLANs that allow administrators to isolate VMs over the network but still allow access to public network resources. This feature helps improve network security and privacy, and was unavailable in Windows Server 2008.
Hyper-V Extensible Switch: This is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 that provides an open platform that allows users to install extensions and plug-ins from third party developers. This feature is important since it allows users to extend the capabilities of their networks and VMs. It also allows users to add functionality without the need to code it themselves. Each extension configuration is unique to every instance of Hyper-V Extensible Switch, and consequently more secure.

Ensuring Consistent Availability of DHCP and Internal Domain Creation Best Practices:

As new classes of network devices and technologies emerge, the use and availability of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services becomes a priority especially in business scenarios that require high DHCP availability and reliability such as Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and video conferencing services which are used frequently in organizations today.
The overall objectives considered by Microsoft when designing DHCP are to provide DHCP services at all times, and to ensure that clients can extend their DHCP lease by contacting a different DHCP server when the first one fails. The first objective of providing DHCP services at all times ensures that business services that depend on DHCP are not interrupted. The second objective covers a worst case scenario where a DHCP server fails but then there is a new server readily available to continue providing DHCP services thus making the system high available and fault tolerant.
A scenario where DHCP availability is not critical is in cases such as enabling public Wi-Fi access to customers in a waiting lounge. While it is inconveniencing that the clients are denied Wi-Fi access for a while due to lack of DHCP availability, no critical business services are affected. In this case, the objective of setting up a second server to take over when the first DHCP server fails is not stressed upon.
Internal domain name recommended best practices include configuring the internal domain name as a sub-domain of the external domain name, or using a different internal domain from the external one. In the first instance where a sub-domain of the external domain is used, the management complexity is less, name resolution is easier hence better performance, while maintenance costs are minimal.
When different internal and external domains are used, management is complex but issues such as split DNS which raises issues with websites, and Microsoft Exchange services are eliminated. This option also means that data leakage from these domains is generic and may not be useful to persons trying to hack into the network.