Build Your Own Private Cloud Series Complete! Here is the list of articles and links:

Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course!

Are you spending less time managing your servers as a result?  Hmm … No!

Server Virtualization is Great, But …

Server virtualization has been a great set of technologies to reduce our capital expenses and some operating expenses by consolidating a larger number of virtualized server workloads in a smaller footprint of physical rack space.  As a result, we’ve been able to purchase less data center hardware and likely have lower power and cooling costs in running our data center.

However, most IT Pros are not seeing a reduction in the amount of time they spend with day-to-day management of server operating systems and applications.  Let face it … whether you have 100 physical servers or 100 virtual servers, you still have 100 server operating system instances to administer, configure, monitor, patch and update.  In fact, because of reduced capital costs when using server virtualization, many IT Pros report that they are now faced with managing a much larger ( and growing ) number of operating system instances and applications – these days, it seems like everyone in the company wants their own VMs!  As a result, IT Pros are forced to spend most of their day managing VMs and applications, and often don’t have enough time to spend on improving their IT environments.

Private Cloud … To The Rescue!

Well, Private Cloud is the answer! Private Cloud is not a product, but rather Read more

Virtual Machine Templates in System Center 2012 SP1 VMM: Build Your Private Cloud (Series)

Today’s blog post in our “Build Your Private Cloud in a Month” series is the fourth of a 5-part mini-series we’re calling “Deploying Private Cloud Workloads”.  This week we (Kevin Remde, Blain Barton and I) are going to detail and demonstrate some of the key areas in System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager that support the foundational concepts and objects in your Private Cloud environment.  The mini-series parts are listed here:
1.  Hardware Profiles (Monday)

2.  Guest OS Profiles (Tuesday)

3.  Application Profiles (Wednesday)

4.  VM Templates (Thursday) <—Today!

5.  Service Templates (Friday)

Required if following along in the lab:

System Center 2012 w/SP1 Virtual Machine Manager should be installed properly on the domain with at least one Hyper-V host managed in the instance.  For my lab guide on deploying VMM check here:

http://virtuallycloud9.com/index.php/2013/04/build-your-private-cloud-installing-virtual-machine-manager-step-by-step/

What is a VM Template?

VM templates are preconfigured virtual machines images and configurations that are included in the library of Virtual Machine Manager(VMM), which are used for deploying new virtual machines into the environment.

Why is a VM Template useful?

Let’s suppose you have a gold image of Server 2012 that has software and settings customized to your particular needs by templating this image, it can be used to deploy future virtual servers without the need to walk through the same post OS installation steps time and time again.  VM templates can also be used as part of a VMM Service deployment as well, where a group of VMs are deployed to handle a given workload.  In this case, a web server might already be configured to work in a load balancing scenario so that the deployment of an extra VM into the cloud service takes minimal time. We will not be tackling cloud services in this module today however. Read more

Build Your Private Cloud: Installing Virtual Machine Manager – Step by Step

Our series is in full swing and now its time to walk through the installation of System Center 2012 VMM to begin managing our VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen hosts, virtual machines, and templates.  Assuming you have Server 2012 installed already, plenty of disk space and at least 4GB of ram, your first step is to go grab the VMM bits from here: System Center 2012 with SP1

When the download begins you can pause all of the other images except for VMM, so it would look like this:

Once you have the VMM server OS built, we need to install the Windows Assessment and Deployment Toolkit as it is a pre-requisite for the VMM installation process to be successful.  You can grab the toolkit Read more

Build A Private Cloud Series Has Begun!

Keith Mayer and Yung Chou kicked off our “Build a Private Cloud” series on Monday with this new TechNet Radio episode where they talk through many of the topics involved in Private Clouds and Virtualization environments.  Check out the episode here:

This video was then followed up by Yung Chou with his article on “Why Private Cloud?” In this article he dives into the benefits of building a private cloud in your datacenter, you can check it out here:

http://aka.ms/whyprivatecloud

Next Yung and Keith came back with a video for initial steps into building the proper foundation for a Private Cloud in their second TechNet Radio installment:

Matt Hester continues the series with his step by step guide to building out a proper storage foundation for the private cloud. Check out the article here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/matthewms/archive/2013/04/03/build-your-private-cloud-in-a-month-foundation-windows-server-2012-storage.aspx

Keith Mayer will be back again next with his discussion on Networking. We hope you enjoy this series, now go get started on your Private Cloud!

Virtualization Experts Series – Virtualization From A Single Pane of Glass – System Center VMM – An Overview

As our virtualization environments continue to grow with VMware, Hyper-V,  and Xen Servers we need to take a new look at the management capabilities we require to properly do the job of VM administration.  In order to achieve a single pane of glass across all of these Hypervisors today we take a look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  With the release of System Center 2012 SP1 several new capabilities and features have been opened up, so let’s dig in.

A quick list of the new enhancements in System Center VMM:

  • Manage bigger clusters (Up to 64 Nodes versus the 16 Nodes in Previous Version)
  • Manage bigger hosts via Server 2012 (320 Cores and 4TB of Memory)
  • Administer larger VMs (64 vCPU, 1 TB Ram)
  • Create and Manage Isolated Tenant Networks Read more

New Series for the Month of March : 20+ Days of Server Virtualization

It’s March already???   Our new series is kicking off and this month we dig into server virtualization.  The first installment details out what all is coming this month.  As always, if you would like to contribute to one of these articles or have any tips you would like to share please give us a shout, it’s all about sharing information folks.  Now without further delay, here is the first post in the series:

http://itproguru.com/expert/2013/03/become-a-virtualization-expert-with-20-days-of-server-virtualization-virtexpert-itproguru-part-0-of-20/

Migration and Deployment Series – Part 19 – A look at Windows 8 Applocker

Matthew Hester brings us the 19th installment of our series this month with a look at Windows 8 Applocker.  He writes,

“One of the Technologies we introduced with Windows 7 was AppLocker.  AppLocker presented a great new way to control what applications could run on your desktop environments. Now if this sounds familiar to what Software Restriction Policies (SRP) do for your environments, it is important to understand the difference between the two.  SRP are still supported and still helps to control applications in your environment.  They approach the challenge differently. Fundamentally there are two ways of controlling applications:

  • Block/Deny List: With this approach your create a list of all the malicious applications in the world and create rules to block them.  This approach is similar to antivirus programs.  As an administrator your would create deny rules for all the unwanted software that they would like to block within your business.  While effective, the challenge was keeping up with the malicious software and having to create a deny rule for each application.  This is essentially how SRP (in XP and Server 2003) worked, although you had allow or deny rules, it was still all based on the list.
  • Allow List: With this approach you create a list of all approved software that you need in your environment and create rules to allow only those applications and block the rest. In the allow listing mode you block all unwanted software by default and allow only those applications to run that have been explicitly allowed.  While this method is effective, the main challenge is you have to create a portfolio of applications for your environment.  AppLocker works in the allow listing mode.”

Continue reading more here!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/matthewms/archive/2013/02/28/migration-and-deployment-a-look-at-windows-8-applocker-part-19.aspx

Migration and Deployment Series – Part 16 – Step by Step – Deploying Windows 8 Apps via System Center 2012 SP1

Keith Mayer takes on part 16 of our series with a Step-by-Step approach to using System Center for deploying Windows 8 apps in the enterprise.  He writes: “Among a whole host of new management features, Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager adds the ability to now deploy and manage Windows 8 apps for enterprises.  These Windows 8 apps could be internal apps that have been created by your corporate developers, or they could simply be published Windows Store apps that you have reviewed and would now like to distribute to your Windows 8 users.

In this article, I’ll step through the process of deploying internal Windows 8 apps and published Windows Store apps to users.  If you’re familiar with prior releases of System Center 2012, you’ll note that this process is very similar to deploying traditional desktop apps to Windows clients – with some additional options to support the new Windows 8 app model.”  Read more here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/02/25/step-by-step-deploying-windows-8-apps-with-system-center-2012-service-pack-1.aspx

System Center 2012 SP1 Explained: App Controller for VM and Cloud Service Deployment by Yung Chou

Part 14 of the Migration and Deployment series is live.  In this article, Yung Chou discusses and gives step by step answers on the self service model and role based security: “One essential characteristics of cloud computing is a self-service mechanism. Both NIST SP 800-145 and Chou’s 5-3-2 Principle have discussed well. The self-servicing capability is essential since not only it reduces support cost fundamentally, but making it easy for a user to consume provided services will continually promote the usage and ultimately accelerate the ROI.  In System Center 2012 SP1, App Controller is the self-service vehicle for managing a hybrid cloud based on SCVMM, Windows Azure, and 3rd party hosting services.”  Read more here: http://aka.ms/ac2