Application Management-Example-Deploying a Service to Your Private Cloud (Part 1)
Featured during Brad Anderson's Keynote at MMS 2013!
Hey Readers, I have a real treat for you today. You’ve seen the title so you already have a rough idea what I’m getting ready to cover. This blog post is a first in a series to discuss an example downloadable System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) service template we are providing on the TechNet Gallery as well as walking through in a “paint by numbers” approach to ensure you are setup for success leveraging this example solution.
What is VMM and Service Templates You Ask?
Well if you haven’t worked with VMM or Service Templates in the past, I highly encourage that you review the following information to help educate yourself on the value and power of VMM and service templates for deploying simple to complex workloads in your own organization.
System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager
Using Service Templates in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012
How to Configure the Properties of a Service Template
Background
Let’s start off with some background. This series of blog posts will concentrate on one example of how you may leverage Virtual Machine Manager service templates to deploy a multi-tier workload (in our case I chose a three tier SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Farm – seen below) quickly and seamlessly within a private cloud. Why SharePoint? Frankly, what’s being deployed is less important than how it is deployed. However, SharePoint does provide us a multi-tier deployment that may represent advanced workloads in your organization. It is my hope that you can dissect this service template example provided with this content (plus related scripts) and reuse for your own benefit.
Benefits of the Solution to YOU
So what are the benefits of this solution to you? This service template example for deploying a SharePoint 2013 Enterprise farm is provided as a scenario based solution to show you how service templates can be leveraged to deploy a workload into a Microsoft private cloud. The content within this service template is just as valuable as the demonstration of deployment itself in my opinion.
Key Points of Benefit
Multi-tier Workload Deployment Into a Private Cloud: This service template provides the SQL, WEB, and APP tier components for the successful installation of SharePoint 2013. This goes beyond a simple single tier deployment and provides a lens into the requirements for orchestrating 3 tiers to deploy a workload with VMM.
Community Aspects: This solution leverages a mature, highly downloaded and utilized CodePlex project [AutoSPInstaller] for the deployment of SharePoint 2013 Enterprise in a silent and automated way. The blend of this solution with service templates can easily depict a better together story with other potential workloads needing to be deployed into a private cloud.
Learn by Example: This solution has within it areas such as
- SQL Tier deployment and customization
- Execution of pre and post PowerShell scripts to install a workload
- Synchronous and ordered execution of a workload deployment leveraging the service template technology within VMM
Potential Hoster Modeled Solution: This service template could be leveraged as an example on how to deploy workloads in a Hoster environment with a few updates to the example.
Key Overarching Point
You do not need to use this service template just to deploy SharePoint - use it as an example to build your own service template workload deployment using some of the structure outlined within this deployment example.
Want it now?
Want to get the solution now and start to review it? Head over to the TechNet Gallery and check it out!
Virtual Machine Manager Service Template Example for SharePoint 2013
Want more? Watch for the Next Posts 
Here’s what to expect in the coming posts:
- The Puzzle Pieces: All the important pieces of the puzzle that make up this solution
- What are the main steps?
- Preparing your environment for importing this service template
- Preparing and customizing your SQL tier base VHD
- Preparing and customizing your web and app tier base VHD
- Importing and customizing the service template for SharePoint 2013
- The AutoSPInstaller script and how that plays into this solution and what needs to be updated to support it
- Discussion on order of operation for the deployment of a service template from SQL, scripts, tier dependency
- What are the main steps?
To get you even more excited on things yet to come, check out this sweet video showing the end to end deployment!
That’s it for now! I hope you are as excited as I am to kick off and get this series moving.
Till next time (Happy Service Template’ing 
)