Franske ITC-2900 SP14 Possible Projects

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Logfile Collection and Analysis

Introduction

The Inver Hills ITC department has an academic, demonstration, and research network ("ITCnet") which is comprised of a number of physical and virtual hosts running various operating systems including several versions of Windows server and desktop, several Linux distributions, vmWare host servers, and BSD along with network devices from Cisco and HP. In an effort to better understand and track what's happening on this network a number of monitoring tools have been implemented over the past year including Nagios and Cacti which can poll SNMP and service availability data from these various systems and devices. We'd like to take this to the next step by centralizing log file collection and analysis and allowing us to use a single program or web portal for viewing log events across all these devices.

Resources

Software programs you may want to evaluate in this space are:

  • Software 1
  • Software 2
  • Software 3

You may research and evaluate other programs as well. Programs should be able to collect logs from our wide variety of host OSs and devices for central monitoring. Strong preference should be given to free and open source packages as we are a resource constrained department.

Deliverables

  • Design and implement a test environment for logfile collection and analysis which includes the wide variety of hosts and network devices which may generate logging
  • Install and test a minimum of three logfile collection and analysis packages
  • Develop criteria for evaluating the packages
  • Develop a recommendation on the best choice based on department constraints
  • Prepare a written whitepaper and oral presentation detailing the process, criteria, results, and recommendation

SAN Benchmarking

Introduction

There are a number of different schemes for connecting remote storage to hosts over a network infrastructure. In this project you will setup and benchmark several popular methods of doing this and report on the results. The primary SAN technology you will be working with is iSCSI. The SAN servers, referred to as iSCSI "targets", may be Windows servers, basic Linux servers, or specialized SAN servers or devices. Furthermore these may be configured as direct block access to a physical device such as a hard drive or as a virtual hard drive file residing on top of a physical drive and filesystem. The clients, referred to as iSCSI "initiators", may be vmWare servers, Windows servers or desktops, or Linux servers or desktops. As you can see there are many variables which can exist in even a simple iSCSI system. Your job is to setup a number of different configurations and benchmark them for ease of setup, speed, and other factors which you determine and report on the results.

Resources

  • ITC Department FreeNAS SAN Server
  • Windows Storage Servers
  • Client Servers/PCs
  • ITCnet network backbone
  • Possible vendor SAN hardware

You may research and evaluate other programs as well.

Deliverables

  • Design and implement a test environment for iSCSI which includes a variety of initiators and targets
  • Develop criteria for evaluating iSCSI performance and define test environment, benchmarking software and settings, etc.
  • Prepare a written whitepaper and oral presentation detailing the process, criteria, and results

Virtualization Orchestration

Introduction

There are a number of different schemes for connecting remote storage to hosts over a network infrastructure. In this project you will setup and benchmark several popular methods of doing this and report on the results. The primary SAN technology you will be working with is iSCSI. The SAN servers, referred to as iSCSI "targets", may be Windows servers, basic Linux servers, or specialized SAN servers or devices. Furthermore these may be configured as direct block access to a physical device such as a hard drive or as a virtual hard drive file residing on top of a physical drive and filesystem. The clients, referred to as iSCSI "initiators", may be vmWare servers, Windows servers or desktops, or Linux servers or desktops. As you can see there are many variables which can exist in even a simple iSCSI system. Your job is to setup a number of different configurations and benchmark them for ease of setup, speed, and other factors which you determine and report on the results.

Resources

  • ITC Department FreeNAS SAN Server
  • Windows Storage Servers
  • Client Servers/PCs
  • ITCnet network backbone
  • Possible vendor SAN hardware

You may research and evaluate other programs as well.

Deliverables

  • Design and implement a test environment for iSCSI which includes a variety of initiators and targets
  • Develop criteria for evaluating iSCSI performance and define test environment, benchmarking software and settings, etc.
  • Prepare a written whitepaper and oral presentation detailing the process, criteria, and results