Discussion Responses

Prompt

As you engage with technology in the twenty-first century, you have already interacted with virtualized computing environments. Where you save your personal photos and files may be on a virtual cloud. A database or software system that you use at work may run on a virtual machine instead of a physical machine. You may even be working on a virtual desktop at your place of employment. As you have learned about virtualization this week, you have seen that virtualization is becoming more used by organizations because of its various benefits.

Assignment

In your response to your peers:

• Express how you have not used the virtualized environment your peer has used.
• Explain various advantages and disadvantages of having the stated computing environment be virtual instead of physical

PEER POST # 1

Hello Everyone

My name is Tyler Matthews, and I am from South Louisiana but currently reside in Northwest Arkansas. I am working towards my bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences with a concentration in Software Development. In my day job we utilize many virtual environments daily, including our four primary redundancy workspaces. These four workspaces use to be 4 individual servers in our server room but have now become moved to virtual versions contained on two servers along with many of our other systems we use. This was done to help minimize the number of connections that must be managed and secured to these databases and helped to help us to conserve space in the server room. There isn’t a high number of components that are involved in our virtualized computing environment but mostly contained to the servers in which these virtual computers are hosted on, along with the connections to the external hardware associated with our business.

PEER POST # 2

My name is Ken Irons. I am a Junior level student at SNHU seeking a Bachelor’s degree in IT with a concentration in Software Development. I currently work as a Technical Analyst for a Software company that monitors and maintains networking connections for telecommunications companies. I live in Nashua, NH, and am currently about 25 minutes from the SNHU campus. I am extremely excited about this class since it directly deals with things I use at work every day.

A virtualized environment I use every day is VMware Workstation. Workstation is a hosted hypervisor that allows you to dedicate resources from your hosting PC and create a virtual machine instance on the physical machine. This allows our employees to access both our ticketing environment and email while troubleshooting their issues in their environment. One of our clients has a private EDN and it requires the use of a VM to access it securely. By utilizing the VM and Forticlient, along with their personalized 2FA (two-factor authentication), we can access their individual environments and databases. The “problem” that this VE solves is security. By requiring the use of a VM, the client prevents the use of unauthorized access and programs to their secure environment.

I know this environment is virtualized for several reasons, including the obvious, being called a virtual machine. While the VM does utilize physical resources, the machine does not exist physically. Instead, the machine is accessed via instances and can be altered by changing the specs on the VM. This requires no change in the physical and can all be done through sliders in the settings menu. The components that make up the environment are the host machine, hypervisor (or virtual machine manager), and the virtual machine itself. However, the workstation provides several virtual networking components, including virtual switches, virtual network adapters, the virtual DHCP server, and the NAT device.