Virtualization platform for VMX

Request for Proposal

Author: Pum Walters, Ivo Nijhuis, Arjen Jansen

Version: 2016v1
Date: September 2016

Versiebeheer
Version
2015v2
2016v0
2016v1

Status
Draft
Draft
Draft

Date
20150831
201607
201607

Author(s)
Arjen Jansen
Pum Walters & Ivo Nijhuis
Pum Walters & Ivo Nijhuis

Changes
2016 setup
Reworked

Table of contents
Content
Table of contents ................................................................................................................................. 1
1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1
IST-SOLL............................................................................................................................... 2
2 Current Situation (IST).................................................................................................................. 3
3 Required Situation (SOLL) ........................................................................................................... 3
3.1
Required technologies and products .................................................................................... 4
3.2
Proof of Concept Platform..................................................................................................... 4

1 Introduction
This document offers purpose, goals and guidelines for the VIRT project for the System and
Network Engineering (SNE) students. This project manual describes what we create; the
description of how we work can be found in the companion document VIRT Project Manual.
Both documents can be found on the project's Moodle page
(https://moodle.informatica.hva.nl/course/view.php?id=20)
This project is set up as a real situation where a customer approaches an IT delivery organization
and requests for a proposal and subsequent solution consisting of prototype and documentation.
The students role is that of employee in the IT delivery organization; teachers will play various
roles in the customers and IT delivery organization. It is important to understand that teachers
handle questions differently depending on the role they have at any point in time. Similarly, this
document is partly written from that perspective, and partly as a formal document in your
education. The customer and IT delivery organization are fictional.
Within these documents information can be found about:
Project Manual
o project schedule
o product, process and portfolio deliverables
o assessments
Request for Proposal
o system specifications
o technical requirements

1.1 IST-SOLL
A Request for Proposal is a document which asks IT delivery organizations (companies) to
propose a solution to existing desires or problems, usually described as an IST (current situation)
and a SOLL (desired situation). The document may be very detailed, but it may also be condensed
or even unclear. In that case, engineers and account managers could interview the customer to
elicit details.
The RfP in this project is intentionally terse. It is your responsibility to elicit necessary details from
VMX (or SNE-Tech) officials, or, if that is impossible, to base your decisions on sensible working
hypotheses. In that case it is very important to document your reasoning: why have you made
certain choices, what are the alternatives you considered, etcetera.

Virtualization platform for VMX

2 Current Situation (IST)

In the diagram below, VMX's current topology is shown

3 Required Situation (SOLL)

By means of a website our customers should be able to order a virtual platform. When a customer
orders their required virtual platform, at least the following items need to be specified:

Operating System platform (at least two different Linux versions and one Windows server
version)
Amount of RAM
Amount of disk space
Choice of three different service levels:
o Low: basic system
o Medium: basic system + daily backup
o High: basic system + daily backup + high availability (redundancy)

The configuration chosen should be automatically made available to the customer without any
VMX operator intervention. At the same time our ordering system needs to be updated. From this
ordering system it should be possible for us to retrieve a management report with an overview of
all ordered virtual servers together with basic customer company information and the order date.
After creation of the virtual server, the customer should to be able to manage their own server. This
means that they are able to login to their server as administrator and to configure and install
additional products within their virtual environment.

Virtualization platform for VMX

3.1 Required technologies and products

Due to available skills within the organization and to reduce education costs the system can only
make use of the following technologies and products:
-

Linux Debian
Linux KVM
Linux libvirt
MySQL database server
Apache Tomcat
Apache Velocity
Java
HTML/CSS
JavaScript/JQuery
IDE Eclipse

During the project development process additional requirements with respect to security and high
availability will be determined. These will also include the technologies/products that may be used.
Any tool not listed above (or in any additional official future requirement documents) must be
avoided.

3.2 Proof of Concept Platform

The PoC must be implemented on a prototyping network created from team members' equipment.
Since one laptop isn't likely to be powerful enough to serve the entire PoC, different roles must be
assigned to different laptops: web server, servlet server, container/VM server, etcetera. Since team
members may not always be available, it is important to duplicate these roles or ensure that every
network component is (in principle) capable of performing every role.

Virtualization platform for VMX