Objective: To gain experience preparing an executive summary and to research how
virtualization may benefit an organization in terms of their server infrastructure.
Deliverables: On or before 11:59 pm (WebCourses time) Sunday September 4, 2022 submit the
following via WebCourses: An executive summary of your findings with respect to virtualization
of a server infrastructure, citing two sources that will substantiate your conclusions. Limit the
length of your executive summary to a maximum of 2 pages. (Note that executive summaries
do not normally contain cited references, but in this case I want you to include two references
that you cited in your summary.)
Description
What you are going to do in this project is pretend that you are the system administrator for an
organization that is attempting to determine if virtualization of its server infrastructure would be
beneficial to the organization. So you are examining the basic benefits and problems that are
related to server virtualization.
In this project you will do some very basic research that would provide a high-level overview of
how server virtualization might benefit an organization.
You will prepare an executive summary of your findings as the deliverable for this project.
Normally, an executive summary summarizes a more complete accompanying report. You will
not be preparing this more complete report in this project, you will only be preparing the
executive summary.
Normally, executive summaries do not include references, but in this case, I want you to cite two
references that you used to substantiate the claims that you make in the executive summary.
If you have never prepared an executive summary before, the following links might be useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_summary
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3660.html
http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/documents/execsum/
Note that an executive summary is different from an abstract.
Abstracts tend to be most common in academic environments whereas executive summaries are
primarily confined to business environments.
An abstract is a brief summarizing statement which is read by people who are trying to decide
whether or not to read the entire document.
An executive summary is the document in miniature which can be read in place of the longer
document. CEOs and COOs are too busy to read your entire hundreds of pages reports, so the
executive summary is intended to summarize your full reports findings and provided
recommendations to the CEO or COO.
Confine your research to the area of server virtualization. We are not interested at this point in
network or storage virtualization issues.
Consider the following issues in your report:
Server consolidation ratios – what is a realistic number that the organization might expect
to see. What are the variables here?
Define at least three potential benefits that the organization might achieve through
server virtualization.
Define at least two potential disadvantages that the organization needs to be aware of
and their potential consequences if ignored.