Private Cloud Primer
Private clouds can be a confusing topic. To me, a private cloud is a highly virtualized data center or portion thereof that through orchestration is flexible and acts as a utility, adapting to demand as it arises.
Paul Schnackenburg defines it a different way -- by building one! Schnackenburg explains his method in a two-part piece, which you can start reading here.
Schnackenburg, as makes sense, begins with hardware. This cloud is about as simple as it gets, consisting of just three servers: a domain controller and two servers in a cluster. To keep costs down, Schnackenburg built his own machines each equipped with gigabit Ethernet to keep the interconnects speedy. Drives are 2TB per server that are mirrored using RAID 1.
Drives communicate through Native SAN for Hyper-V from StarWinds. And as you can guess, the hypervisor driving all this is Hyper-V. The initial build was with Windows Server 2008. Schnackenburg has since upgraded to the just-released Windows Server 2012.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/13/2012 at 12:47 PM