DATA CENTER VIRTUALIZATION FRAMEWORK IN ETHIOPIAN HIGHER

Abstract

Ethiopian higher learning institutions(HLI) data center runs physical data center in which a one application for one server architecture is exercised. Such architecture leads to under utilization and wastage of resources. Using virtualization technology enables lowering the size of the infrastructure, thus resulting in a huge savings on energy and other resources including management time. Cost reduction , energy efficiency and the reduction of a company’s carbon footprint are some of the significant benefits of using virtualization but virtualization technology is a long way from Plug-and-Play to unlock those benefits effectively, an information technology (IT) expert requires the appropriate set of model to be followed. In most cases, organizations have enough resources to move to virtualization without requiring additional budget. Certain researches have been conducted on virtualization especially client virtualization, application virtualization and network virtualization. But, little attention was given for server virtualization. The objective of this research is to explore the current traditional infrastructure practice and to propose data center virtualization framework using design science research methodology (DSRM). The goal is to look for option(s) that brings a preferred solution for University data centers that increases service availability and utilization of hardware. In this work a virtualization framework is proposed, and evaluated using the same services that are currently used in the university. Experiments are carried out to check and compare the resource utilization of both the physical machines and Virtual machines(VMs). By using both the experiment and the analysis result, well-matched virtualization framework was developed. The developed frameworks was tested on three services. Before virtualization each of these services were running in separate physical machine. In our experiment, by consolidating these services using virtualization, the study showed that it is possible to provide the same service using only a single server. The resource utilization of that single server increased as follows: Central processing system (CPU) usage increased from 4% to 17%, physical memory usage increased from 15% of 16GB to 62% of 16GB, and capacity of hard disk space in use was 67.4% up from 32%. The Universities data center will use the proposed well-matched framework to enable them increase their levels of utilization of the servers