Repeatable Virtualization of Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) System Servers

The expanding demand for Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) information, analysis, and real-time data to support the warfighter activities has resulted in an increasing number of multiple systems, applications, data sources and stores. This increased capabilities need has the potential to overwhelm the physical footprints to deploy the servers, data storage devices and communications gear. With limited space, storage, and computational capabilities it is becoming more difficult to deploy new and more capable systems. Unfortunately, the newer systems do not always maintain the legacy systems capabilities and this could adversely affect the warfighter mission. An approach to this problem that has worked in the commercial world is to instantiate a virtualization environment wherein existing infrastructure is multi-purposed through the use of tools like VMware®. Virtualization of large commercial environments has demonstrated savings in energy use, physical footprints, maintenance costs, application deployment effort and costs. In addition, virtualization has demonstrated increased uptime and reliability of the computing environment. A virtualization approach is proposed for a test and evaluation ISR system that currently resides on multiple servers distributed through the development facility and at a remote site. In order to demonstrate the capability of a deployment ready virtual environment.