Franske ITC-2900 SP14 Possible Projects

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Available Projects

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

Infrastruture-as-a-Service (IaaS) virtualization is heavily used by the ITC department for offering academic courses. Our current primary solution is vmWare ESXi hypervisors with vCenter orchestration which provides a GUI for provisioning of VMs and administration of hypervisor servers. We would like to evaluate alternative virtualization environments, particularly the orchestration of hypervisors in case vmWare changes pricing in such a way that we can no longer afford to operate using ESXi and/or vCenter. There are a number of open source virtualization platforms which are potential alternatives.

Resources

Hypervisors:

  • vmWare ESXi
  • Hyper-V
  • Xen
  • KVM

Orchestration:

  • vCenter
  • CloudStack
  • OpenStack
  • OpenNebula
  • Eucalyptus
  • ProxMox
  • Convirture

You may research and evaluate other programs as well. You will need to evaluate differences between programs including working with different types of storage (e.g. iSCSI), advanced networking (e.g. VLAN support), backup capabilities, and live migration of VMs (e.g. vMotion). Strong preference should be given to free and open source packages as we are a resource constrained department.

Deliverables

  • Research a variety of options and select a minimum of three promising configurations for testing
  • Develop criteria for evaluating the packages
  • Design and implement a test environment
  • Install and test a minimum of three solutions
  • 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

Dual WAN Internet Access

Introduction

Cable and DSL connections have made "high-speed" broadband Internet access a reality for a growing number of people. Many small business and non-profits rely on cable and DSL for Internet service instead of expensive "business class" telecommunications circuits of the past such as T1 and T3 lines. Especially in rural Minnesota organizations like these can still have problems when distance and service limitations put restrictions on the type and bandwidth available over these "high-speed" connections. A few users uploading photos or streaming video can easily overwhelm a 512kb/s DSL line. In situations like these the obvious solution is to bring in a second line from the same provider, but how then do you divide the network traffic between these two Internet connections equally while still keeping your internal network united? This project will explore and test various methods, programs, and devices to determine if this is possible and what advantages and disadvantages exist (including cost) in achieving the maximum possible speed.

Resources

  • Cisco Routers
  • Linux Routing
  • OpenWRT
  • pfSense

You may research and evaluate other programs/devices as well. Many dual-WAN solutions require that the two WAN IP addresses be in different subnets (e.g. two different upstream default gateways) remember than you may not have this luxury if the only Internet connection available is from a single DSL provider. Your solution will need to test and evaluate how to work around this problem.

Deliverables

  • Design and implement a test network environment which mimics a dual DSL configuration
  • Research a variety of options and select a minimum of three promising configurations for testing
  • Develop criteria for evaluating the options
  • Build and test a minimum of three solutions
  • Develop a recommendation on the best choice based on constraints
  • Prepare a written whitepaper and oral presentation detailing the process, criteria, results, and recommendation

Taken Projects

All projects are currently available.

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