Building Clouds – Introduction to “Fabric” Track:

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With the release of Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 it is really amazing to see customers (including service providers) deploying large scale clouds to deliver services such as IaaS, DaaS and SaaS.

While both these technologies possess a huge set of features that help to build a robust Cloud platform (The “Fabric”) in an agile and elastic manner – achieving those capabilities in a timely manner is critical.

Doing this is a matter of getting the right set of techniques, best practices and knowledge required to easily integrate these pieces together, and build a cohesive solution that meets the needs of the platform and reduces TCO. On this site’s Fabric track I will analyze the contents and technicalities needed to build and manage the Fabric in a more efficient way.

I have spent most of my career in Japan working with enterprises and service providers to build and manage large scale platforms based on Windows, Linux and UNIX and manage those using Microsoft tools. I joined Microsoft from IBM Japan where I took part in large scale deployments for the enterprises in building the infrastructure and managing those, so I will be leveraging those experiences in providing you the Tips, Techniques and Tools/Scripts as samples for your immediate use and reference.

Here is what I am planning to provide you with as part of this Fabric track:

· Bare-Metal Provisioning using SC 2012 SP1 (VMM) focusing on automation that uses both built-in and custom-created scripts in achieving the end-to-end provisioning.

· Hyper-V Host and Cluster Creation and Patch Management using SC 2012 SP1 (VMM) focusing on automation and orchestration that leverages VMM PowerShell Cmdlets.

· Managing Host and Virtual Networks using SC 2012 SP1 (VMM) focus on automating NIC Teaming, Enabling QoS and network card offload settings, Virtual Machine Network (VM Network deployments).

· Managing External Storage using SC 2012 SP1 (VMM) focusing on automation and provisioning of storage for the Hosts/Clusters to streamline Rapid Provisioning of Virtual Machines.

· Integration Scenarios for VMM with SPF (Service Provider Foundation) in building multi-tenant cloud infrastructure – focusing on Best Practices, code samples for creating wrapper libraries that integrate with your custom portal code for “Administrator” and “Self-Service” user roles.