Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course!
Are you spending less time managing your servers as a result? Hmm … No!
Server Virtualization is Great, But …
Server virtualization has been a great set of technologies to reduce our capital expenses and some operating expenses by consolidating a larger number of virtualized server workloads in a smaller footprint of physical rack space. As a result, we’ve been able to purchase less data center hardware and likely have lower power and cooling costs in running our data center.
However, most IT Pros are not seeing a reduction in the amount of time they spend with day-to-day management of server operating systems and applications. Let’s face it … whether you have 100 physical servers or 100 virtual servers, you still have 100 server operating system instances to administer, configure, monitor, patch and update. In fact, because of reduced capital costs when using server virtualization, many IT Pros report that they are now faced with managing a much larger ( and growing ) number of operating system instances and applications – these days, it seems like everyone in the company wants their own VMs! As a result, IT Pros are forced to spend most of their day managing VMs and applications, and often don’t have enough time to spend on improving their IT environments.
Private Cloud … To The Rescue!
Well, Private Cloud is the answer! Private Cloud is not a product, but rather an approach for designing, implementing and managing your servers, applications and data center resources by reducing complexity, increasing standardization and automation, and provide elasticity – the ability to easily scale your data center up, down, in or out – to support evolving business and technical requirements.
Private Cloud applies the same principles used for scaling and managing the world’s largest public clouds to your private data center environment. Now, you can have your very own cloud!
Build Your Private Cloud – The Series
This month, my fellow Technical Evangelists and I will be writing a series of articles that step through building your very own Private Cloud by leveraging Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS) and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1.
Week-by-week, we’ll be walking through the steps to envision, plan and implement your very own Private Cloud to take your existing data center to the next level and give you the tools and time back in your day for improving IT services and being able to change and shift with your business / IT needs.
I will be providing a weekly breakdown of each topic that we’ll be writing in this series to help you build your own Private Cloud. There is also a main index page that will have links to the entire series. Be sure to bookmark the index page and check back daily as we’ll be continuing to update this page with links to each article as they are published along with additional resources.
For this series, if you do not have an Azure account, you will want to create one. Sign-up for a FREE 90-day trial of Windows Azure http://aka.ms/IaaS so that you have a subscription for following along with the lessons.
During the Free Trial sign-up process, you will be asked for credit card information to confirm that you are a legitimate free trial subscriber. Your credit card information is only used to confirm your identity and you will NOT be charged for any Windows Azure services unless you explicitly convert your trial subscription to a paid subscription at a later date.
Week 3 – Configuring and Optimizing Your Private Cloud with System Center 2012 SP1
- Configure Private Cloud VM Compute Fabric ( Video )
- Zero-to-Cloud: From Bare Metal to Private Cloud Fabric by Matt Hester
- Optimize Workload Placement with Dynamic Resource Optimization and Power Optimization ( Guided Hands-on Lab )
- Creating Private Clouds with System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager ( Video )
- Delegating Access to Private Clouds and Deploying Application Services by Yung Chou