The Benefits of the Private Cloud
What is the private cloud? Understanding this is the hardest part of implementing it.
One of my customers once said the following, and it’s 100 percent accurate:
If you ask five people for a definition of the private cloud, you will get seven
different answers.
—Very smart customer in 2011I like to think of the private cloud as having the following attributes:
Scalable and elastic, meaning that it can grow and shrink as the load on the
application changes
Better utilization of resources
Agnostic of the underlying fabric
Accountable, which can also mean chargeable
Self-service capable
All about the applicationLet me explain this list in more detail. First, the all about the application attribute. In
a physical setup, each server has a single operating system instance, which, as I’ve
explored, means lots of wasted resources and money. The shift to virtualization takes
these operating system instances and consolidates them to a smaller number of
physical servers by running each operating system instance in a virtual machine.
Virtualization saves hardware and money, but it doesn’t change the way IT is
managed. Administrators still log on to the operating system instances at the console
and still manage the same number of operating system instances. In fact, now
administrators also have to manage the virtualization solution. Although you may not
log on to the console of a server, you are still remotely connecting directly into the
operating system to perform management, and this is basically managing at the
console level. The private cloud shifts the focus to the service being delivered and the
applications used in that service offering. The private cloud infrastructure is
responsible for creating the virtual machines and operating system instances that are
required to deploy a service, removing that burden from the administrator.
Think back to the service templates covered in Chapter 6, “Maintaining a Hyper-V
Environment.” Service templates in System Center Virtual Machine Manager allow
the design of multitiered services, with each tier having the ability to use different
virtual machine templates and different applications and configurations. Service
templates allow administrators (and users, as you will explore later) to easily deploy
complete instances of services without any concern for the virtual machine
configuration or placement. Those service templates also integrate with network
hardware such as load balancers, enabling automatic configuration of the network