Mva best practices in planning hybrid cloud infrastructures

Editor's Notes

1. Hello! Welcome to this session on Microsoft Virtual Academy for Best Practices in Planning Hybrid Cloud Solutions My Name is Keith Mayer. I’m a Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft for Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud solutions that leverage Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2. After viewing this session, you can also find me online on my blog at KeithMayer.com
2. Throughout the sessions that are part of this Hybrid Cloud series, we’ve been discussing Microsoft’s “Cloud OS” Hybrid Solution. As a hybrid solution, we’re all about providing “choices” to IT Pros – choices that allow IT Pros to select the most appropriate way to handle application workload needs today, and choices that allow you to easily move application workloads to new clouds down-the-road when new business requirements arise. Our Hybrid Solution provides the ability to define and leverage Private Clouds in your existing on-premises datacentre side-by-side with Public Cloud platforms, such as the Windows Azure cloud platform, as an extension of your on-premises datacentre when additional capacity and scale is needed on-demand to support application workloads. In addition, our Hybrid Cloud solution can also incorporate hosted clouds, supported by service providers that are part of our Cloud OS Network of partners. Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 provides a unified management toolset across all clouds – public, private and hosted – so that you have a consistent experience for provisioning, managing, monitoring, protecting and automating application workloads across all of the clouds that are part of your Hybrid Cloud strategy.
3. In this session, we’ll be discussing Planning Hybrid Clouds. We’ll be reviewing tools, reference architectures and additional resources that can be leveraged to easily get started and prepare yourself for a successful Hybrid Cloud strategy. Let’s get started with assessing what we have today …
4. Assessing your current environment is a helpful part of the planning for any large IT initiatives – it helps you prepare a baseline of what you have today, determine which applications are well-suited to migrating to your clouds, and provide initial input into how to approach the migration. To help in assessing cloud-readiness for your current environment, Microsoft provides a free tool – the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Tool (MAP). MAP is an agentless tool and relies on current management interfaces for discovering existing computers, performing an environment, and generating an assessment. The latest version of MAP, MAP v9.0, includes two reports that are helpful when preparing for a Hybrid Cloud migration – a Private Cloud consolidation report and a Windows Azure VM readiness report. Let’s take a look together at MAP and these reports in our lab …
5. MAP provides a useful assessment of the cloud-readiness of our environment, but other considerations should also be taken into account as part of the planning stage when evaluating Hybrid Cloud solutions. One of the considerations for many organization is geographic diversity – both for supporting a global user audience as well as for disaster recovery purposes. Windows Azure provides the ability to augment your existing on-premises Private Cloud with Public Cloud datacenters that extend across the world. Each Windows Azure datacenter is located >400 miles away from other datacenters to meet the disaster recovery distance requirements of large organizations. Today, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services includes four datacenters in the United States, 2 datacenters in West Europe, and 2 datacenters in Asia. Over the next year, additional datacenters are planned in Mainland China, Japan and Austalia. In addition, Windows Azure includes an additional 20 datacenter locations world-wide for caching frequently accessed data via our Content Delivery Network (CDN).
6. Slide Objective: Discuss how Microsoft builds Windows Azure datacenter for quickly scaling physical capacity Key Talking Points: To support growth in the massive demand for Windows Azure, Microsoft has developed a modular approach to building and expanding physical datacenter capacity quickly – in days, instead of weeks and months ITPACs are pre-assembled, self-contained datacenter “pods” that contain pre-wired racks of servers, storage and networking equipment along with cooling, venting and power management. Multiple ITPACs can be quickly delivered to a datacenter site and interconnected to build and/or grow datacenter capacity By leveraging ITPACs as building blocks for modular datacenters, not only can Microsoft quickly expand physical capacity, but existing capacity is delivered very cost-effectively – in our Gen4 datacenters, we’ve demonstrated a 1.05 PUE ( Power Utilization Efficiency) ratio – whereas traditional datacenters often have a PUE as much as 2-3x higher. Direct attendees to the links on the page for more details. If time permits during the event, you may wish to play one or both videos. Additional Resources: United Nations ITPAC datacenter technology video - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=0d0d24d6-f637-4b50-b118-5c8a0f5bf614 Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPnoKb9fTkA
7. Slide Objective: Discuss how to achieve an SLA of 99.95% for VMs Key Talking Points: Configuring at least two VMs performing the same workload in the same availability set provides a 99.95% SLA Virtual Network SLA = 99.9% VMs in same availability set are automatically placed in separate upgrade and failure domains ( racks ) within a datacenter. Azure SLA is more granular than competition – mapped to availability of specific infrastructure components that are hosting VMs, instead of generically mapped to edge of a datacenter region SLA for VM’s based on monthly availability instead of annual availability ( most of competition ). Complete SLA for VMs available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38427