Hypervisor-Based Virtual Data Center Framework for Higher Educational Institutions.

Data centers (DC) play a very important role in higher educational institutions (HEIs) all over the world, particularly in Pakistan for the provision of expedited and reliable services, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to that educational and financial businesses have been shifted online, which increasing the mandate of virtual data center framework with the support of Learning Management Systems (LMS), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for HEIs. The main reasons preventing this adoption are the cost, complexity, and security. This paper proposed a cost-effective approach for traditional DC. This method-imposed VMware ESXI Hypervisor, which utilizes a single server machine to host multiple servers, vSwitches for network isolation and two DMZs (De-Militarized Zones) are set up along with Mikrotik router firewall policies implemented for the security of DC. The outcome of this study indicates that all the servers worked in the production environment, and the firewall coupled with DMZ implemented in the network prevented DDOS attacks, resulting in the continuity of DC services and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]