13 Modules, six weeks, 2 exam preps and a whole lot of private cloud building going on...

virtuallycloud9  - Build Your Own Private Cloud Series Complete! Here is the list of articles and links:

Are you virtualizing your servers? Yes, of course!

Are you spending less time managing your servers as a result?  Hmm … No!

Server Virtualization is Great, But …

Server virtualization has been a great set of technologies to reduce our capital expenses and some operating expenses by consolidating a larger number of virtualized server workloads in a smaller footprint of physical rack space.  As a result, we’ve been able to purchase less data center hardware and likely have lower power and cooling costs in running our data center.

However, most IT Pros are not seeing a reduction in the amount of time they spend with day-to-day management of server operating systems and applications.  Let face it … whether you have 100 physical servers or 100 virtual servers, you still have 100 server operating system instances to administer, configure, monitor, patch and update.  In fact, because of reduced capital costs when using server virtualization, many IT Pros report that they are now faced with managing a much larger ( and growing ) number of operating system instances and applications – these days, it seems like everyone in the company wants their own VMs!  As a result, IT Pros are forced to spend most of their day managing VMs and applications, and often don’t have enough time to spend on improving their IT environments.

Private Cloud … To The Rescue!

Well, Private Cloud is the answer! Private Cloud is not a product, but rather an approach for designing, implementing and managing your servers, applications and data center resources by reducing complexity, increasing standardization and automation, and provide elasticity – the ability to easily scale your data center up, down, in or out – to support evolving business and technical requirements.

Private Cloud applies the same principles used for scaling and managing the world’s largest public clouds to your private data center environment.  Now, you can have your very own cloud!

Build Your Private Cloud – The Series

My fellow Technical Evangelists and I have authored a content series that steps through building your very own Private Cloud by leveraging Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ( IaaS ) and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1.

Week-by-week, we walk through the steps to envision, plan and implement your very own Private Cloud to take your existing data center to the next level and give you the tools and time back in your day for improving IT services and being able to change and shift with your business / IT needs.

Below is the weekly breakdown of each topic that we’ve written in this series to help you build your own Private Cloud.  Be sure to bookmark this page and check back daily to progress through building your Private Cloud this month!.

WEEK 0 – Get ready to follow along!

WEEK 1 – Build Your Private Cloud Foundation with Windows Server 2012

WEEK 2 – Building Your Private Cloud Fabric with System Center 2012 SP1

WEEK 3 – Configuring and Optimizing Your Private Cloud with System Center 2012 SP1

WEEK 4 – Deploying and Servicing Applications in Your Private Cloud with System Center 2012 SP1

WEEK 5 – Extending and Protecting Your Private Cloud

WEEK 6+: Study and Get Certified on Private Cloud

I want this... a Private Cloud... Matter of fact, fired off an email this morning to kick off the internal thinking about something like this... ;)