UP, UP, AND AWAY! 4 Steps to Success in Private Cloud Computing 14 BY GREG SHIELDS IT
SEEMS LIKE cloud is all anyone can talk about these days. But virtualization is an important step toward developing a private cloud strategy.
If you’ve already virtualized part of your IT infrastructure, you’re probably closer to private cloud computing than you think.
Cloud’s getting all the attention these days because
of the benefits of cloud computing and the inherent limitations of virtualization. Virtualization concerns itself with the virtual machine (VM), how well that VM performs and what can be done once a physical server is virtualized. Private cloud computing takes a wider view, focusing not on the VM itself but instead on the entire infrastructure in which VMs are hosted.
What’s The Buzz About?
Looking past the hype, are the benefits of cloud computing worth attaining? Most assuredly. For a solid private cloud strategy, start by embracing the concept of the virtual data center. That approach will introduce the benefits of cloud computing—further-optimized resources, better ability to deliver services and improved visibility into resource usage—to your IT infrastructure. So how do you get there? The following four steps can help you develop a private cloud strategy and reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Step 1: Understand the
True Meaning of Cloud The IT industry has done itself a disservice by referring
to this whole concept as “cloud.” Too many people see vaporware in what is really a powerful new mindset for managing IT workloads. At its core, private cloud computing represents the collection of assets that you already own—the aggregation of which creates a pool of resources. Out of that pool, you and your end users can create VMs in any configuration that your supply of resources will support.
Self-service is the most important functionality of that resource pool. You can set up a cloud of resources, dole out a portion to specific individuals, teams or projects, and allow them to use the resources in whatever way they see fit. More and more self-service tools are becoming available, some from virtualization platform vendors and others from third parties or customized from public cloud vendors.
If you define private cloud computing using VMware’s
suite of management tools, it’s little more than a cluster of hosts that have VMware High Availability and
Distributed Resource Scheduler enabled, integrated with the self-service tools mentioned above. With these assets, along with the storage and networking that accompanies them, you’re able to flexibly create VMs up to the level of your supply of physical resources. So with what you’ve already got today, you’re well on your way to developing a complete private cloud strategy.
Step 2: Pump Up Performance
and Capacity Management Many IT professionals don’t actively manage system performance, even after virtualizing. But to get the benefits of cloud computing, performance monitoring should be a critical part of your private cloud strategy.
Private cloud computing represents an abstraction
of the entire data center. That abstraction consolidates hardware into a set of numbers that measure capacity. Network, storage, processing, and memory all are abstracted into numbers that quantify resource supply and demand.
You see evidence of this abstraction today. For example,
pull up the VMware vCenter Client’s Virtual Machines tab for a cluster and you’ll find a long list of VMs with their processing and memory demand values. Advanced tools such as VMware vCloud Director and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (currently in beta) bring further visualization of these resource values.
Because of the abstraction, it’s important to embrace performance and capacity management at a data center level when adopting private cloud computing. You’ll need more tools than what your virtualization platform alone can provide, but you’ll also need an evolved approach to IT resource management that regards your assets as contributions to a whole.
Step 3: Get Prepped for
New Hardware There’s a new class of hardware now available from
major manufacturers: converged infrastructure. This hardware is modular, making it easy to add computing power, storage, or networking throughput by simply snapping in additional capacity. And manufacturers bundle in management tools to govern this hardware for virtualization.
That handshake between hardware manufacturer and virtualization platform is the real linchpin of private cloud computing. It’s the connection that enables admins to further optimize how VMs consume resources in their
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