Step-by-Step into your own private cloud, with the Windows Azure Pack and System Center

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Step-by-Step into your own private cloud, with the Windows Azure Pack and System Center

KeithMayer.com - Step-by-Step: Getting Started with On-demand Private Clouds using Windows Azure Pack

As I’ve been traveling and speaking to IT Pros about the great scalability, resiliency and offerings in our Microsoft Azure public cloud platform, there’s also been lots of interest around deploying our free Windows Azure Pack (WAP) to bring the power and consistency of the same self-service Azure portal user interface to on-demand Private Clouds provisioned in an on-premises datacenter.

In this article, we’ll step through the process of setting up Windows Azure Pack in a lab environment for provisioning and delegating VM private clouds. Along the way, I’ll call out the specific details that I found helpful to successfully build my own lab environment.

What is Windows Azure Pack?

For a technical overview of the Windows Azure Pack, check out this great Microsoft TechEd session:

Enabling On-demand Infrastructure Services in YOUR Datacenter with Windows Azure Pack

In addition, Thomas Maurer, MVP for Cloud and Virtualization, has written a great article that describes the overall architecture of Windows Azure Pack:

Windows Azure Pack Architecture by Thomas Maurer

What are we building?

Windows Azure Pack certainly has the ability to scale to support very large Private Cloud environments consisting of multiple datacenters. However, in this article, we’ll get started by building a basic lab environment that consists of the following four (4) VMs:

System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) management server VM

SQL Server 2012 database server VM

Service Provider Foundation (SPF) server VM

Windows Azure Pack (WAP) server VM

To configure all four (4) VMs in your lab environment, you’ll need a virtualization host with at least 16GB RAM and 300GB available disk space.

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You guys know how much I dig this idea, of having all that's good about Azure, inside my firewall, avoiding all the "security" and "OMG, the cloud? AAAHHHHhhhhhhh..." angst.