Application Management in a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

Working in enterprise IT organizations here and at other companies has convinced me that applications are the lifeblood of any business. I used to be amazed at how quickly the CIO would get involved if a revenue generating application wasn’t performing as expected. To become a trusted partner to the business, an IT professional has to internalize the reality that infrastructure exists to support applications; thus our assertion that the Microsoft private cloud is focused on the application. This blog is about how the application management capabilities in System Center 2012 empower you in delivering applications more cost-effectively, quickly and reliably to your business.

Empowering the application owners across the organization is key to realizing the IT as a Service vision of private cloud computing. The premise behind creating and delegating private cloud infrastructure is to provide a simple self-service experience to application owners to provision and elastically scale applications as per business requirements.

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Why Choose a Microsoft Private Cloud?

The Microsoft private cloud gives you deep application insight, and management of services, as well as virtual machines. The Microsoft private cloud lets you deliver applications as a service across their lifecycle. You can deploy applications on a self-service basis, and manage them across private cloud and public cloud (Windows Azure) environments. You can elastically scale the application based on what your business needs. You can even virtualize server applications to simplify deployment and upgrading. And with deep insight into the performance of your applications, you can remediate issues faster, before they become show-stoppers. The result is better SLA’s, better customer satisfaction, and a new level of agility across the board.

Deep Application Insight

System Center 2012 delivers rich diagnostics to enable you deliver predictable application service levels. Using the Operations Manager component you can isolate the root cause of the application performance issues down to the offending line of code pretty efficiently (see illustration below), even when you have not written the application code yourself. You can send all the details about the failing code section to your application development counterpart pretty easily. Using the connector between Operations Manager and Visual Studio (currently in CTP), you can create a work item in the developer’s queue so it can be triaged as soon as possible. By creating a process and tool-driven approach, we mitigate the possibility of finger pointing and delays in addressing operational issues with your business-critical applications.

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Delivering Applications as a Service

System Center 2012 offers you the ability to define standardized application blueprints - called service templates - which can be used to automatically deploy application services to shared resource pools. Defining your application requirements with a repeatable construct like service templates makes deployments faster and less error-prone. Once service templates are defined, your application owners can go to the App Controller component of System Center 2012 where they can easily specify configuration requirements like application topology, scale-out rules, health thresholds, and upgrade rules and then kick-start a “one-click deployment”. App Controller also provides a compelling visualization of the of the application service, including all the requested service tiers and the pooled resources (see illustration below).

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How to Get Started

If you want to get started deploying application services to your private cloud, download the Microsoft System Center 2012 Release Candidate and give it a try. You can also request to join our Community Evaluation Program.

You should also check out these related posts for additional details:

Finally, you can check out how our customers are benefiting from the Microsoft private cloud:

Cheers,

Anant Sundaram

Sr. Product Manager
Microsoft