Microsoft Talks Up Private Clouds at MMS
With the release of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM 2012), Microsoft is aiming to help its customers move from creating virtualized infrastructures to building and managing private clouds. Set for release later this year, Microsoft issued a beta of SCVMM at the Microsoft Management Summit, taking place this week in Las Vegas.
Explaining how SCVMM will enable private clouds, Brad Anderson, corporate VP of Microsoft's management and security division, said in a blog post Tuesday:
"Our management offerings are designed to help IT organizations build private cloud solutions that deliver application services, not just virtual machines. With our approach, the applications drive the IT infrastructure, not the other way around. The management technologies at the center give both IT managers and application managers throughout the company a unified view into applications in private, public and hybrid cloud scenarios. With a Microsoft private cloud, customers can use the infrastructure they know and own today to build and deliver private cloud computing as a managed service, including other vendors' tools, platforms and virtualization technologies."
Microsoft describes SCVMM as a core component of private cloud solutions, where IT can create common infrastructure and application services. Private clouds, according to Microsoft, are resources dedicated to an organization whether they are on or off premises. That's not unlike how others describe private clouds. Like public cloud offerings, Microsoft says that private clouds offer self-service, scalability and elasticity, while providing added control and customization from dedicated resources.
The combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V and System Center will provide the basis of building and managing dedicated cloud environments providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
In addition to offering what it calls Hyper-V Cloud deployment guides and access to service providers, Microsoft said it is also offering IaaS assessment services through its partners and Microsoft Services.
On top of SCVMM 2012, Microsoft has unveiled some key enabling technologies, including System Center Project, code-named "Concero." System Center Project is the successor to the Microsoft SCVMM Self-Service Portal that will allow department-level managers to deploy and administer apps on both public and private cloud resources.
Also enabling Microsoft's vision of private clouds, as reported by my colleague Kurt Mackie, is System Center Operations Manager 2012, which now fully integrates Microsoft's AVIcode acquisition, helping pinpoint flaws in applications built on Microsoft .NET and J2EE platforms. System Center Service Manager 2012 enables self-service requests from business managers to request cloud resources. And finally, System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 adds "enterprise-class" centralized backup and protection, de-duplication support and SharePoint integration functionality.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/24/2011 at 1:14 PM