Tip of the Day: Private Cloud Recipe

Today’s (Networking) Tip…

Private Cloud Recipe

Looking for something new to serve at an upcoming gathering?  Wow your guests with this quick and easy Private Cloud recipe!

Ingredients

Datacenter Fabric Mix

A heaping helping of STORAGE!

Any flavor will do:  SAN, Fibre-Channel, SAS, SSD, JBOD, Storage Pools and Spaces, etc.

One or more cups of DATACENTER NETWORKING!

Add one or more datacenters worth of NICs, switches, virtual switches, Ethernet LAN, WAN connectivity, VPN, etc..  The greater the capacity the better!

A dollop or two of COMPUTE!

A properly proportioned base of computational horsepower will bring out the flavor of the other cloud ingredients.  I like mine with Hyper-V, but feel free to add in VMWare or Citrix as desired. 

Cloud Sauce

Virtual Machine and Application Workloads - The Pièce de résistance

A good host always keeps the unique dietary requirements of his guests top of mind and makes a variety of workload resources available to guests to deploy on top of the fabric as suits their need.  Some guests may even want to bring their own, and that’s okay!  It’s this flexibility, along with the ability to easily deploy and scale, that make the cloud secret sauce so tasty!

Preparation

  1. Start with a suitable mix from the three primary fabric food groups;  Storage, Networking Technologies, and the Compute required to run workloads.  These are derived from the same core Windows Server infrastructure service ingredients we are familiar with from traditional datacenter implementations.
    CHEF’S TIP – Actual measurements can vary, but a good host always plans in order to ensure adequate resources available should anyone come back for seconds, or more guests arrive with additional workloads.
  2. Group individual ingredients (datacenter resources) and mix well until larger resource pool  forms.  The capacity and number of the pools is up to you and how many diners you expect. 

A good dish simply takes individual resources, which might even be spread out across multiple ‘kitchen’ locations, and pools them into a larger single unit of scale for easier deployment, management, accessibility…...and taste.

CHEF’S TIP - When preparing ingredients, you want to be sure to categorize them by capability or intended use, for example; disks with the fastest I/O, networking hardware with the fastest throughput, etc..  This allows them to be allocated by 'tiers of service' to the hungriest workloads, or the discriminating diner who is willing to pay just a bit more for the finest and freshest ingredients you have to offer ;)  Management software such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)  provides the ability to identify and classify resources in this manner.

  1. Create and maintain the cloud structures necessary to assign resources where needed.  Using SCVMM you can create group structures to…
    • Organize and isolate along a business unit or customer entity.
    • Specify the resource pools to which a group has access.
    • Delegate administrative privileges for both fabric administration tasks and customer/tenant self-service and deployment of workloads.

Final Thoughts

Capacity Planning

More hungry customers than you originally planned?  No problem!  By abstracting policy and management tasks away from the resources themselves, cloud implementations allow you to seamlessly upgrade or add fabric capacity far easier and with far less disruption than previous methods.

Preventing Overeating

After all, if you are serving resources in an ala carte fashion you will want a way to limit consumption to subscribed levels.

Additionally, you want to prevent your diners from walking away with a bad taste in their mouth if they should say, put too much (workload) on his plate than can be conformably supported. 

In the cloud world, resource utilization and quota policies will help you with both aims!

Bon Appétit