uncontrolled VM mayhem. In reality, with the private cloud, there will be better
tracking and more controls than with the processes used in most organizations today.
I’ve seen many organizations that hate the idea of users having quotas and self-
service, but they actually have no tracking or limits for user requests, and it’s simply
the fact the VMs take so long to create in environments that slows the sprawl of VMs.
Ultimately the sprawl happens, however, and they have no idea of who owns what and
if it’s still needed. This would not happen with a private cloud!
The key point is that adopting a private cloud brings only benefits to IT departments
and the organization as a whole. The private cloud, allows far greater utilization of the
resources that the company already has, better insight into those resources, much
better responsiveness to the requirements of the business (such as provisioning new
environments), and the ability for everyone to focus on what they care about—the
application.
Go back to those first questions I asked. If your answers to any of those are “Yes,”
then a move to the private cloud model makes sense. Also, remember that you don’t
have to expose all of its capabilities to end users—you can have self-service
capabilities but let only the IT teams use them to better enable provisioning processes.
It’s still helping the environment.
Remember that the private cloud provides a foundation on which you can offer many
types of services. You can offer basic virtual machines as an in-house IaaS. You can
offer environments with certain runtime environments like .NET or J2E to enable
PaaS where business units can easily run their applications. You can even have
complete services that model an entire multitiered application through service
templates, thus offering SaaS. It’s really whatever makes sense for your organization.
Typically, organizations will start with basic IaaS, offering virtual machines, and then
build up from that point on as confidence and experience grows. Also, with Microsoft
Azure Stack, you may want that flexibility for applications to be able to run anywhere,
which may also drive an Azure Stack private cloud implementation on-premises.
My recommendation is to get your organization on the latest version of Hyper-V. The
new capabilities make it the best virtualization platform out there. It adds support for
far larger virtual machines and larger clusters. It has better replication and availability
features and better support for Direct Access to network hardware and network
virtualization. It has full PowerShell management and guest-level Fibre Channel
access, which means more workloads can be virtualized and therefore you can have a
simpler datacenter. And that’s just scratching the surface.
It probably seems daunting. There seems to be a lot of change going on, and if you are
struggling to keep things running—either by not patching servers or by patching them
manually and always installing servers by running around with a DVD or ISO—this
will seem like a huge difference. But it’s a good difference. A large time investment is
required initially to get these processes and solutions in place, so some organizations
may need to bite the bullet and use a consulting company to help them get up-and-
running. If that’s the case with your company, make sure that the consultants don’t