Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track guides

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide

“The scope of this document is to provide customers with the necessary guidance to develop solutions for a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure in accordance with the IaaS PLA patterns that are identified for use with the Windows Server 2012 operating system. This document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution.”

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Management Architecture Guide

“The scope of this document is to provide customers with the necessary guidance to develop solutions for a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure in accordance with the IaaS PLA patterns that are identified for use with the Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This document provides specific guidance for developing a management architecture for an overall private cloud solution.”

Microsoft Private Cloud evaluation resources

Private Cloud: Making it Real

Private Cloud Evaluation Guide

Identity Management in the Age of Hybrid IT

The Four Pillars of Identity – Identity Management in the Age of Hybrid IT
Identity Infrastructure Capabilities–Identity Management in the Age of Hybrid IT

Designing Your Cloud Infrastructure

This Design Guide is focused on the design of the cloud infrastructure and the components that make up a cloud infrastructure. It does not provide information on how build a complete private cloud, public cloud, or hosted cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS) solution. The cloud infrastructure contains the building blocks on which any Windows Server 2012 cloud service or delivery model is built.

This document is comprised of the following sections:

• Cloud Infrastructure Technical Overview. This section provides a short overview of cloud computing and the requirements of a cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud Infrastructure Design. This section provides an introduction to the cloud infrastructure design process.
• Designing the Cloud Storage Infrastructure. This section provides information related to design considerations for building the cloud storage infrastructure using Windows Server 2012 platform features and capabilities.
• Designing the Cloud Network Infrastructure. This section provides information related to design considerations for building the cloud network infrastructure by using Windows Server 2012 platform features and capabilities.
• Designing the Cloud Compute (Virtualization) Infrastructure. This section provides information related to design considerations for building the cloud compute (virtualization) infrastructure using Windows Server 2012 platform features and capabilities.
• Overview of Suggested Cloud Infrastructure Deployment Scenarios. This section provides information on three suggested cloud infrastructure deployment scenarios and the design decisions that drive selecting one over the other.

Service Catalog as pre-requisite for Private Cloud and Data Center transformation

If you have ever studied ITILv3 you will have seen the Service Pipeline.

Here’s a very nice post that argues that “The service catalog  has a central place in data center and cloud transformation“; Service Catalog is part of Domain 5 of Cisco’s Domain Ten framework for data center and cloud transformation. It also contains an interesting post on the history of the Service Catalog.

Microsoft Cloud OS and Private Clouds

Ignoring the poor form of quoting oneself; in a post last year I commented on “amount of IT infrastructure capability it delivers as standard” in Windows Server 2012 and “Microsoft’s learning from the demands of running infrastructure at large scale with virtualization as an integrated part of that”. Microsoft’s recent announcement of System Center 2012 SP1  seems to reinforce this view.

Microsoft Advances the Cloud OS With New Management Solutions

What is the Cloud OS?

Microsoft and Service Providers Deliver on the Cloud OS Vision Together

Also on learning from scale: How Xbox can transform your datacentre

The Register’s view on How to build a perfect private cloud with Windows Server 2012 shows how this might all be put together on-premise.

That article also raises a key point about application availability and whether that is delivered by the application or the infrastructure. The move to application replication that we saw with, for example, database availability groups in Exchange 2010 and the use of local storage in that application, has begged questions about when is a SAN functionality required (thinking hardware-based storage replication) and raises the possibility of replication to public cloud. Where to place the responsibility for application availability is tricky as infrastructure architects may be reliant on platform or application architects to be aware of what availability models are in the application; that information could surface through technology roadmapping and vendor management. The separation of the application (software), platform and infrastructure layers in private cloud architectures can be seen in both the Microsoft model:

and the Cisco Domain Ten blueprint; for more on the latter see Introducing Cisco Domain Ten(SM) – Cisco Services’ Blueprint for Simplifying Data Center and Cloud Transformation.