Private Cloud Components
The difference between virtualization and the private cloud is in the management
infrastructure. The same compute, network, and storage resources used for a
virtualization infrastructure can be used for a private cloud. To turn virtualization into
a private cloud solution, you need the right management stack. For a Microsoft private
cloud, this is System Center 2016 added to the virtualization foundation provided by
Hyper-V 2016. Additionally, Windows Azure Pack is deployed on top of System Center
2016 to provide the complete user experience. Another option to implement a private
cloud is Microsoft Azure Stack, which is covered later in this chapter. I provided a brief
overview of System Center in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtualization and Microsoft
Solutions.” Here I cover the components that are critical for a private cloud and the
reasons they are critical.
Many of the benefits of virtualization are related to the abstraction of resources,
scalability, and controlled self-service. All of these benefits primarily come through
SCVMM, so in this section I cover some of these.
Consider a typical virtualization administrator who has full administrative rights over
the virtualization hosts and the compute resource but no insight into the storage and
network. This leads to many problems and challenges for the virtualization
administrators:
“I have no visibility into what is going on at a storage level. I would like to have
insight into the storage area networks that store my virtual machines from
SCVMM.”
“Deploying server applications requires following a 100+ page procedure, which
has human-error possibilities and differences in implementation between the
development, testing, and production phases. I want to be able to install the server
application once, and then just move it between environments, modifying only
changes in configuration.”
“My organization has many datacenters with different network details, but I don’t
want to have to change the way I deploy virtual machines based on where they are
being deployed. The management tool should understand my different networks,
such as production, backup, and DMZ, and set the correct IP details and use the
right NICs in the hosts as needed.”
“I need to save power, so in quiet times I want to consolidate my virtual machines
on a smaller number of hosts and power down unnecessary servers.”Although the name System Center Virtual Machine Manager might make it seem like
it’s focused on virtual machine management, some of its most powerful features
relate not to virtualization but to the storage and network fabric, as discussed in this
book. SCVMM integrates with the storage in your environment by using SMI-S to give
insight into the storage, but it also classifies and assigns storage to hosts as required.