Free ebook: Microsoft System Center: Integrated Cloud Platform

We’re happy to announce the final ebook in our System Center series: Microsoft System Center – Integrated Cloud Platform by David Ziembicki and Mitch Tulloch, series editor.

Download all formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub) hosted by the Microsoft Virtual Academy .

Introduction

Microsoft System Center: Integrated Cloud Platform is targeted toward IT executives and architects interested in the big picture of how Microsoft’s cloud strategy is delivered using Windows and Microsoft System Center. We provide an all-encompassing approach to understanding and architecting Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Windows Azure based solutions for infrastructure as a service. The combination of Windows, System Center, and Windows Azure is a cloud-integrated platform, delivering what Microsoft calls the “Cloud OS,” which is a common platform spanning private cloud, public cloud (Windows Azure), and service provider clouds. This platform enables a single virtualization, identity, data, management, and development platform across all three cloud types.

This book is organized by cloud type and we begin with a short overview of the Cloud OS strategy from Microsoft and a high-level hybrid cloud architecture that will be detailed throughout the book. Next we cover the design and deployment of private cloud solutions using Windows and System Center to deliver the software-defined datacenter where storage, network, compute, and management are all virtualized and delivered by the Microsoft platform. We cover some of the substantial cost savings that can be achieved using the Microsoft storage platform, the multi-tenancy enabled by our network virtualization platform, and the consolidation ratios that can be provided by Hyper-V’s scalability and high performance.

With a private cloud foundation in place, we next move to the public cloud and detail how to extend the private cloud datacenter (network, storage, compute, management) to Windows Azure while treating it as a seamless extension to your datacenter. Finally, the third cloud type, service provider clouds, are covered using the same approach—extending your datacenter to service providers. The end result is a robust hybrid cloud architecture where consumers of IT within an organization can choose the optimal location to host their virtual machines and services on any of the three cloud types based on which cloud makes the most sense for their workload.

Acknowledgments

This book summarizes the detailed architecture and design work captured in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) reference architecture guides from Microsoft Services. The architectures represent years of lessons learned from our largest and most complex customer implementations.

Contributors

Joel Yoker, Adam Fazio, Artem Pronichkin, Jeff Baker, Michael Lubanski, Robert Larson, Steve Chadly, Alex Lee, Yuri Diogenes, Carlos Mayol Berral, Ricardo Machado, Sacha Narinx, Thomas Ellermann, Aaron Lightle, Ray Maker, TJ Onishile, Ian Nelson, Shai Ofek, Anders Ravnholt, Ryan Sokolowski, Avery Spates, Andrew Weiss, Yuri Diogenes, Michel Luescher, Robert Heringa, Tiberiu Radu, Elena Kozylkova, and Jim Dial.