Building a private IaaS Cloud with Windows Server 8 whitepaper

MSDN - Building an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Using Windows Server 8

"This paper provides guidelines for building private and public clouds by using the next version of Windows Server (code-named Windows Server 8). It provides an overview of the common problems that partners and IT professionals currently face, and describes solutions for cloud-based data centers. This paper also describes the various technologies that are built into Windows Server 8 to enable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) functionality of cloud-based data centers.

This information applies for the following operating systems:
Windows Server 8

Included in this white paper:

Overview of Cloud Services
Windows Server 8: Designed for the Cloud
The Multi-Tenant Cloud
The Highly Scalable, Low-Cost Data Center
Managing and Extending the Data Center
Migration Path

..."

I've been hearing more and more about private clouds, to the point of even hearing it banded about at my day job (were, like many large business, they don't jump too quickly to new tech). Being a dev, I feel it's important to know as much of my stack as possible, including those areas that fall within traditional IT.

So now that they are chatting up the private/internal cloud solution they are working on, I want to know a little more on this, but being me, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the "new," with the newest shiny cloud toy  being Windows Server 8.

Side bar: Why the focus on private when public clouds have been available for a few years? Data security paranoia. To many people are still to freaked out about their data not being in their data center, under their control. Doesn't matter that the primary cloud vendors probably have security that's many times better, it's a perception and reality has little to do with it. So everyone wants all the benefits of the "cloud" while keeping all the 0's and 1's in the building...

So I'm keeping an eye on this space and when I saw this 27 page whitepaper, I wanted to capture it for future reference.

Here's a snap of it;

And a snip from the introduction;

Introduction

Enterprise customers want to build private clouds and transition to an IT-as-a-service operational mode. Hosting providers want to build public clouds and offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions to their customers. However, it is difficult to build cloud solutions that allow for multi-tenancy, performance, isolation, reliability, scale, and cost.

The next version of Windows Server (code-named Windows Server 8) introduces a significant number of new features that provide all of the required capabilities for building an effective cloud solution in an open platform. By using automation, having an open platform, and being standards based, a Windows Server 8-based data center decreases the total cost of ownership and reduces susceptibility to failures due to interoperability issues. The Windows Server 8 open platform allows partners to extend the functionality beyond what is in the platform.

This paper explains these new Windows Server 8 capabilities and clarifies how they relate to other Microsoft cloud initiatives. This paper also focuses on IaaS solutions for cloud-based data centers.