Creating a Private Cloud by Using System Center Virtual
Machine Manager
In this section, I assume that System Center Virtual Machine Manager is fully
configured with all of your hypervisor compute resources, such as all the Hyper-V
servers that have been placed into failover clusters that have been dynamically and
power-optimized to get the best-performing and highly available solution that
minimizes power waste by turning off hosts when not needed. SCVMM has been
connected to your hardware load balancers, all of the storage area networks have their
SMI-S providers in SCVMM, and the storage has been classified as gold, silver, or
bronze for all locations. Logical networks and sites have been defined. Virtual machine
templates for all common configurations have been created, and common services
have been modeled as a service template. System Center Operations Manager is
monitoring the environment, System Center Data Protection Manager is backing up
and protecting the environment, and System Center Configuration Manager is
providing patching, desired configuration, and inventory information. Everything is
well configured and healthy, so you are ready to create a cloud.
To truly understand what goes into creating a cloud in System Center Virtual Machine
Manager and all of the options, I will walk you through creating a cloud and granting
users access to it. This will show all of the capabilities and the delegation options for
various groups of users.
You use the Virtual Machine Manager Console to create a new cloud, which is
achieved through the VMs And Services workspace by selecting the Create Cloud
action from the ribbon. The first step is to specify a name and description for the
cloud. A good example may be Development for the name, and then for the comment
specify development purposes, with access to the development network only and
silver tier storage. Make the name and description something useful.
The next step sets the resources to be included in the cloud, as shown in Figure 9.7.
The host groups will govern the computer resources (virtualization hosts) that will be
included in the created cloud in addition to the various storage and networks that are
available in those host groups. Remember that just because a host group is specified
does not mean the entire capability or connectivity of that host group is exposed to the
cloud. You can specify exactly what you want to give access to later in the wizard. The
same host groups can be included in multiple clouds. Also note in the dialog box that a
VMware resource pool can be selected directly.