Microsoft System Center 2012 Revealed
, January 19, 2012 Microsoft's System Center 2012, which we discussed in Microsoft's System Center 2012: Building A Private Cloud, is the latest attempt by a big vendor to bring private cloud to the masses. While there are many improvements to System Center, building a private cloud using anyone's software is far from easy. At Microsoft's private cloud reviewers' workshop, we got a peek at the sausage factory. There are a lot of components to configure, but Microsoft has done a good job of streamlining many of the processes.
Cloud creation is performed after you define the templates for the underlying hardware. A cloud is just a set of resources that are grouped into a unit. You can then assign them to users and roles. In our case, PrivateCloud20 is using a logical network called Contoso and the lb01.contoso.com load balancer.
We set the capacity for this cloud offering at 12 Gbytes of RAM, total, unlimited storage, and a maximum of 10 virtual machines. All the VMs for this cloud service are based on Hyper-V, but cloud has included Citrix Xen or VMware.
Microsoft's private cloud offering is multitenant by its very nature. IT defines the capacity of a cloud service, and then users and roles are assigned capacity and rights within that cloud. You can define many cloud services that are ultimately shared across the physical infrastructure.
