Private Cloud Primer, Part 2

Recently I walked you through how Paul Schnackenburg began to build a private cloud. The system consists of three servers: one a domain controller and the other two a two-node cluster virtualized by way of Hyper-V under Windows Server 2012.

Having 32GB of RAM leaves ample room for software which is the topic of part two of Paul Schnackenburg's build.

We already mentioned Windows 2012 which handles core server and hypervisor chores.

For management, the domain controller is loaded with Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM 2012, an acronym barely simpler than the name it represents!).

For storage the cloud uses StarWind Native SAN. The setup here was pretty straightforward, although once his volumes were set up, it did take several hours to synchronize (we are talking about terabytes of data after all).

The system will ultimately run with more than 10 virtual servers. Besides Hyper-V, Schnackenburg is also running ESX, vSphere and Citrix Xen Server virtual machines. That's a lot of virt to chew on, but it all runs in a single console.

Schnackenburg is already planning his next move, which includes more ESX-based nodes and another physical server.

And what was the build like? Schnackenburg actually found it fun!

Posted by Doug Barney on 12/04/2012 at 12:47 PM