 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been involved in the IT business since 1981. Now during that time, I've worked with a lot of different operating systems from the mainframe world, the UNIX world, well before we start talking about Linux, going all the way back to the days when Microsoft was working with IBM with DOS. Of course, I went from there to Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 3.1 for networking, all the way through to the current technologies. Now during that time, I've had some experience in the security world as well. And of course, I've worked with other competitors when it comes to the world of the cloud, as well as with Microsoft Hyper-V. My goal is to be able to share with you my experience with Microsoft, with security, and with the world of the cloud as we take a look at how we can deploy private cloud services through the use of Microsoft's new System Center 2012. Well, as an introduction to what we're trying to do, we'll start off in this module by making sure we can understand what the private cloud is and what that really means for us. So we'll have first of all a discussion about the private cloud, talk about the things we need to do to be able to prepare to deploy that cloud. That includes understanding the components, not only of the cloud, but of what System Center 2012 has to offer. And we're also going to look specifically at the use of Hyper-V hosts and managing them with the Virtual Machine Manager. We'll start off first of all by just talking about the private cloud. We'll compare that to the public cloud. And we'll make sure we understand some of the differences between them, what the benefits are of the private cloud with the use of Microsoft tools. And of course, as I said, we'll talk about the use of System Center 2012. Now, when we take a look at the clouds, there are some things that we have to think about. First of all, why the cloud? What are our benefits? Well, when we think about the traditional business disadvantages, where we had physical servers and each physical server would house some sort of a role or service like maybe be our exchange server or the SQL server. What we saw was on average that those physical servers were at about 15% utilization of their capabilities. That meant their processor, their memory, and all the rest of it. So when you think about that, we are using rack space for a physical server. We're using electricity to be able to power those physical servers. We're having to really beef up the HVAC to be able to cool that room down for using a bunch of physical machines that not only cost us money, but cost us power and space to be able to house these applications and still not get full utilization. Whereas one of the benefits of the cloud is that we can begin to virtualize the data center. That means that we can take these different services and roles that were on physical servers and put them onto a single server that we call the Hyper-V host, where we're now paying for one physical server, yeah, probably a little more money than any of the others just because we want more capabilities out of it. But we're certainly paying a lot less power using a lot less space and better utilizing those resources, its memory and its storage and its network card and the rest of it, processor as well. And so by consolidation, we're getting more out of our money. Now again, like I said, we usually had one server per application. Well, that became a high cost when you think about it per application for, again, just the power in the physical server. Whereas now we're getting a lower operational cost immediately out of the benefit of the cloud. Now remember, when we talk about the cloud, we are talking about virtualizing these environments and be able to manage that environment as a single environment. So we got rid of those unused servers, we began to get into that consolidation. And what's even better about that is when you think about the traditional server, most of its data was stored on that server on its hard drive, which meant we had more work to do to be able to back up each of those individual servers to make sure that we were ready in case of a disaster or trying to maintain business continuity. Whereas now with the cloud, we can have all of our data on a centralized storage area network, a storage area network that can by itself take care of its own resiliency as far as backup and restores or having duplication. But not only that, but if something went wrong, we could move a virtual machine literally from one host to another host and bring that thing back up online hours, maybe even days before we could have done a full restore to another bare metal physical machine and brought that back online. So you're getting better resiliency, better support for the backups, better support for recovery, all of those are benefits that we have from the cloud. Now, there are some differences between a public cloud and a private cloud. First of all, in the public realm, that usually means it's not inside of your management. So you're sharing resources, perhaps with other customers, whereas on a private cloud, you are dedicating the resources to the virtual machines that you want. You have often in the public cloud limited control, as you should, because the people managing that cloud should be in charge of its security. Whereas you'll get more control in the private cloud, because it'll be up to you as administrators, as far as what other users can do, as far as self service or how you delegate the control of authority. Now with the private, or I should say with the public cloud, you have limited options for customization. The private cloud is yours fully to customize as you need to. Now we could say that the public cloud has a lower operational cost. You're not paying for the power. You're not paying for the administration. I mean, I guess really you might be a little bit in the cost that you pay for the use of the cloud. But that would probably be an advantage over all of the management costs that you would have to incur with the private cloud. But hopefully is offset again by you being able to take care of the resources, you having more control and you being able to customize that cloud in a way that best meets your business needs. Now with Microsoft and with System Center, there are some big benefits to having a private cloud. Number one, you have that cross platform integration. That means that we can support things like the virtual machine manager to manage all of the different host machines. And those host machines can have a variety of operating systems, not just Windows products. They can also contain a variety of applications. In fact, we'll even talk about some of the great ways that you can push out the virtualized form of an application through the server app V. So you have a lot of capabilities. It is certainly scalable because it is a high performance cloud computing platform. That means that you can expand through different hosts that are running hyper V that you can dynamically have virtual machines shut down if they're not being used to save power to have them turned on or have more hosts turned on to host more virtual machines as you have more demand. So you have a better performance and I think giving you a better efficiency. Now you can also improve your application availability, because again, this can be application centric as far as the design with the use of server app V. You can virtualize applications and make it look like it's running on a host machine when in actuality it's running somewhere else in the back end on the cloud. And of course the customization is a lot easier. You're in control of it. And it might even be a hybrid cloud where you're using several different types of hosts. Nobody said that it had to be just hyper V. You might be running a VMware ESX server or maybe some of the older models of virtualization that you have with Microsoft, although we'll see some of those aren't supported anymore in the current version of system center and with hyper V. Now when it comes to system center 2012, by the time we're done with this module, I will talk more about the interaction. But as far as some of the things you have as far as the tools of the components, you have ways of being able to deal with application management. You'll have an application controller. You'll have the operations manager. You'll have the virtual machine manager. And I do promise that we'll talk about how those interact. As far as dealing with services, well, we have the service manager and we'll look and see what that does for us. It also works hand in hand with another system center component called Orchestrator, which is a way of automating different types of actions or services that you want. And as far as managing the infrastructure, we have the virtual machine manager to be able to work with a variety of different types of virtualization hosts. We have the operations manager to be able to help us in monitoring how not only the host is running, but how the virtual machines are running and how the network is running. We can push out changes with the configuration manager to make automation or to make multiple changes at once to be able to have consistency. And we have protection through the DPM. And like I said, we'll talk about all of these different components, at least as a high level in this module, we'll get into more detail as we need to. But it's important that when we get to that point that I am able to tell you, hey, this is how all of these components and system center work together. Now one thing you should know about system center 2012 is that when you purchase this, it is a package. You can't buy just operations manager, you can't get just configuration manager. Now with system center 2012, you will get the entire suite. Now it's up to you what you install, it's up to you what you use. But the nice thing is that it is fully integrated. And that if you use all of these components, you can make management of the cloud much easier. You can lower the operational costs. And you'll like the way in which automation can help make your business cloud more scalable when it needs to shrink when it needs to more operational and better able to meet the business needs.