SCVMM allows the network to be designed in SCVMM, providing easy network
assignment for the virtual workloads, including providing network virtualization with
connectivity to nonvirtualized networks with 2016. All of this insight into the
compute, storage, and network resources is completely abstracted for the end user,
enabling simple provisioning. Because all of the resources are exposed and managed
centrally, this leads to a greater utilization of resources, which is a key goal of the
private cloud.
Once all of the types of resources are centrally managed and abstracted, a key piece to
the private cloud is creating the clouds that can be consumed by various groups within
an organization. These could be business units, teams of developers, or parts of IT, or
they could even be used by the same group of administrators for provisioning. But
using separate clouds for different users/groups provides a simpler tracking of
resources. A cloud typically consists of key resources and configurations that include
the following:
The capacity of the cloud, such as the amount of memory, processor, and storage
resources that can be used by the cloud and the hosts that are used
The classifications of storage exposed to the cloud
The networks that can be used by the cloud
The capabilities exposed to the cloud, such as the maximum number of vCPUs per
VM
Library assets available to the cloud, such as templates
Writeable libraries for the purpose of storing virtual machines by cloud usersNotice that the cloud has a specific capacity assigned rather than exposing the full
capacity of the underlying resources. This means that a single set of hosts and storage
could be used by many different clouds. Once clouds are created, the cloud is assigned
to groups of users, or tenants, and those specific tenants have their own quotas within
the capacity of the cloud. Individual users in the tenant group have their own subset
of quotas if required, giving very high levels of granularity and control over the
consumption of resources in the cloud. Like clouds and underlying resources, many
tenants can be created for a single cloud. Clouds and tenants are defined and enabled
through SCVMM. SCVMM also enables visibility into the usage of current cloud
capacity and features role-based access control, which means that end users could be
given the SCVMM console to use for the creation of virtual machines because they
would see only options related to their assigned actions; however, this is not a good
interface for end users to consume.
To provide the self-service capability commonly associated with the private cloud,
System Center 2016 offers an interesting choice. In the 2012 wave of System Center,
the obvious choice for an end-user interface to provision and manage services in the
private cloud was the System Center App Controller, which not only exposed clouds in
SCVMM but also integrated with Microsoft Azure–based clouds and even hosting