How to build a private cloud

It is not a simple matter to build a private cloud. Let's begin to understand the expectations and definitions of the business environment, the cloud. So that we can structure the model we have created. If you want to ensure that the entire organization is covered, you must understand all of its processes and the techniques for building cloud computing. Here are ten steps to think about, build, and maintain your private cloud.

First, what do you want?

The cloud journey is a huge IT trend. The problem is that the term cloud computing also means something for everyone. To begin this journey, businesses need pragmatic cloud computing goals. Many businesses find they are committed to virtualization when it comes to cloud computing, like data center physical hardware consolidation, energy savings, and cost savings. Others find its virtualization process going to the next stage, where standardization and automation are part of its IT process.

But a handful of companies are preparing for organizational change and tackling tough "people problems," like silos, service copies, security and service management. These issues are usually not technical in themselves, but cross organizational boundaries and will remain in the political realm for a long time.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the cloud, especially about it. One of the most common misconceptions is that the cloud is completely virtualized. Although virtualization often plays a significant role in private cloud deployments, private clouds can simply be a shared infrastructure. For example, Google's Gmail or Microsoft's SkyDrive, both of which are public cloud services, are not overly dependent on virtualization.

On the contrary, a large number of physical hardware behind the scenes. Private cloud is also true for your organization, shared service creation, to replace many different duplicate services, the use of virtualization assessment is only as part of the service implementation. For example, the shared file server service may supersede the file server for many departments and it may be implemented on a physical server because of compatibility between VMware vMotion and Microsoft Cluster Service.

Realistic expectations

What you should expect is that there is no real self-service IT in your organization. The IT department spent years packing processes and processes around the activities of creating and managing servers, and for good reason. Often these processes are responsible for system monitoring, determining size and dependencies, documenting system design and responsibilities, handling licenses, and more.

Allowing anyone to provide a server or service without an approval mechanism is suitable for a specific lab or development environment but in the production IT environment is indeed a fast track to confusion, sprawl and downtime. However, it is reasonable to expect more process automation and standardization through the use of workflow tools and approval mechanisms that have become part of Embotics' V-Commander or enStratus Networks products.

Cloud Journey technology less challenging, and more man-made challenges, as the process decomposition and reconstruction, small tasks automation, and standardization. IT clumsy, sluggish for user needs screening, may not be re-thinking about the work of their own from the right place to take the exam. Similarly, the IT department is overworked and may not have enough time to track cloud solutions, although the cloud can save time.

The order in which you work together to manage your IT efforts is important because it supports IT as it complains about other delays in focusing on cloud computing delays. The maxim that money-making processes cost money applies to IT staff; it costs a prepaid investment in time saving the ensuing time.

Finally, expect all levels of management, including human resources, to support the transition to the cloud. It is not just the business sector seeing delays in improving IT on its own directors, but also the automation of the main components of IT staffing, as well as their own goal of dismissal. They may actively undermine the process. The planning of personal problems, from the beginning, the communication of personnel, they are valuable, their efforts will make them free, to do more interesting and productive work.

Understand the workload and service

Going forward like a private cloud model is tough, especially if you do not understand the services organizations rely on. Documentation is the key; without it explaining the relationship between systems, the service level agreement is unknown and can be misleading. The need for people to use these services should be documented so that new cloud services can be built to meet those needs. This is especially important when you are focusing on repetitive services in your organization. For another reason, a department built its own infrastructure rather than using shared services; find out why and agree with them and avoid disputes.

Documentation also applies to standardization itself, since the standard does not explain all requirements and system design needs and will be quickly waived.

Performance information is also critical to turn-sharing infrastructure and cloud-based solutions. Historical performance data of one year or more, as high a clarity as possible, is highly practical and helpful in determining capacity requirements and system size.

Into the virtualization of the road

Although a private cloud does not necessarily have to be based on virtualization, it is a generic model. Virtualization often drives specific knowledge and behaviors in the enterprise. For example, most virtualization requires centralized storage. This same centralized storage will be a building block for building a private cloud, so knowledge gained in virtualizing is useful for private clouds.

Similarly, virtualization usually breaks down the data center network. At the very least, it converts static traffic patterns into dynamic patterns. Turning to shared computing models and cloud-based computing maintains this trend and adds reliance on the network, typically increasing bandwidth requirements. The conversation starts with your virtualization administrator, storage administrator, and network administrator, and as a result, planning for virtualization will be the key to your cloud development, especially as you plan to serve remote offices and mobile users .

5. Understand automation and standardization

Automation is one of the key goals for businesses moving to private clouds. However, without standardization, automation is tricky. For example, the operating system and server standards established, you can assume the file location, file system size and authentication mechanism. Based on these assumptions, you can script the installation of applications and middleware, such as web servers, application servers, and firewall rules. This makes installation easier to repeat, deploy iteratively to anyone, or handle it as soon as a disaster strikes.

Standardization is very hard for a business that fails to practice it. But once standardized, time savings are obvious.

Imagine a company that does not have an operating system, operating system version, or component process standardization. Each server is different, each operating needs require special attention. Patch process or time to install the software is different from each other, the success rate from shaking, because each master

The machines are changing. This usually has two consequences: The incredible amount of time an employee has to perform day-to-day tasks on these servers, and many daily tasks like bug fixes have been skipped because of over-difficulty and unpredictability. Standardization and automated build of one or two operating systems, as well as application deployment process productivity greater than IT productivity gains.

Once you have automatized most of the landscape, you can deliver self-service portals and service categories. Although the business is not necessarily 100% completely self-service driven, many processes can be workflow-based automation; the only interaction is the approval process. IT department

The door can focus on more important issues, how to better support, monitor applications and services. By providing a consistent and repeatable platform, the lives of application managers and developers are also improved. This means that IT operations staff can build more useful, reusable streams

Process, handle and detect system alerts, not every server is an exception. It may also open the door to automated response alerts.

6. Focus on cost analysis: Chargeback VS Showback

As cloud forms and workloads become centralized, it is important for organizations to keep a record of resource use cases and prioritize resource fairness and alignment of businesses.

Chargeback model is still the most effective resource account model is the most effective one. Businesses that do not have the resources to consume their account history are struggling with chargeback because it requires inventorying and defragmentation of every server and application as they move to the cloud. The process itself is good for the business, reducing waste, reducing contagion and putting pressure on applications and system administrators to handle the right virtual machines.

Careful, forward-looking, and creative job management, the CFO will give in to the budget for some decent solutions, keeping in mind that the chargeback process should not be abrupt and cost as little as possible.

Businesses that can not chargeback immediately can often showback, generate management reports, and show where resources are being used in the cloud. Showback is a great first step toward a true chargeback model and useful for the first step in getting a private cloud to get budgets and expectations.

Many companies deploy showback technology, just as the chargeback model treats this model. Specific items and departments allocate a cash account, except that the bill will never be sent to the "customer." This is a very effective way of tracking and keeping resources, but this approach is unfamiliar to developers, application management, and others who never need to organize and document the resources used.

7. Get it all

Smooth security is a big part of IT, and when you're on the move, it's a good time to think about security. It is also a good fit to consider new technologies.

Although cloud computing does not need to be virtualized, the use of virtualization opens up like internal virtual machine (VM) firewalls and intrusion detection

Acting on the door to such features as virus scanning, there are still some features that pass APIs like VMware VMsafe. While many clouds use traditional approaches to building security, opening up new approaches can save time and money and increase flexibility. For example, internal VM firewalls and internal intrusion detection may replace complex private VLAN settings, saving time and reducing complexity.

Another type of security measure is disaster recovery (DR), many products and the choice of maintenance dedicated to offsite copies of virtual machines. A virtual machine level of storage duplication helps the storage administrators who have to acquire and maintain costly matrix-based replication licenses, WAN accelerators, and Fiber Channel-to-IP converters. Copying can also be done in different matrices and is generally not possible with matrix-based methods. At the VM level, you can easily manage recovery point objectives (RPOs) and reply time objectives (RTOs) with new, cloud-oriented alternatives. Some product industries manage failover and failover, and can significantly reduce the need to maintain enterprise disaster recovery by automating the deployment of DR rules to VMs. The DR plan is usually added after the new server is implemented, leaving the server unprotected for short periods of time.

8. Understand the importance of monitoring

Having centralized services into the private cloud can have many benefits, but performance monitoring can not be easier. Service relocation usually means more reliance on network performance, which in turn requires expanded monitoring and additional tools to perform this task.

More and more performance monitoring tools have begun to provide a single monitoring interface that is useful for troubleshooting systems, storage and network administrators. Collecting data from the application monitoring system report is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. But saving a lot of time quickly tells us what looks like a network is actually a storage issue. Some performance monitoring tools also help desktop services and support, enabling end users, developers and administrators to trigger high-resolution networking, storage and VM performance data logging when problems occur. This feature is especially effective for intermittent problems and environments that do not trigger other performance alerts. In addition, data can quickly identify the source of the problem.

Application monitoring often greatly improves the private cloud environment, primarily because of better documenting needs and the directory processes that companies use for consolidation. Virtualization also offers high availability and fault tolerance options at the virtual machine level, and high availability is used throughout the VM.

9. Completion of the future use of the function

Private clouds and virtualization break the organization out of many issues that the IT community has tried for years. Centralize, standardize and automate workloads and workload management tasks Free time to do other things, like focusing on new technologies. This in turn reduces reliance on outside consultants and builds expertise and expertise within the organization.

Alan Kay, a computational scientist, recognized the importance of this when he said "predicting the future is the best way to create the future." This is also true in the business. Teams have an open mind where appropriate, how business goals are achieved, how to change IT to make it more predictable and easier to support. Ultimately, instead of just trying to stay on track, people will have more time devoted to business development.

10. Remember, we are always together

The biggest issue for a company's journey to the cloud is internal collaboration. The political system and the operation of the city wall, which have been established for many years among all parts of the enterprise, are obstacles to the cloud project.

Private clouds are expensive and you do not realize any cost and time savings when implementing this technology yourself or in a single department. Maintaining flexibility and meeting the needs of all aspects of the business is central to the private cloud. In order to achieve this, all parties must be open and honest about their needs, useful documentation, work iteratively.

Make sure cloud plans are space-adjusted and change as everyone learns in their new environment. IT island to disappear. Usually corporate networks, storage and systems administrators work alone and guard each other's territory. The most effective way to implement virtualization and the private cloud is to have a team that includes members from every department in all areas working together to realize the benefits for the business.

Cloud applications usually rely on the network, especially when applications are centralized in the data center, not at the user. Storage is the key to virtualization, and the decisions made by storage managers long term impact service delivery, service level agreements, costs and time. The new technology allows businesses to reap greater benefits, provided IT staff keep in mind that it is not their network, their storage and their systems. The cloud and its infrastructure belong to the enterprise.

The system is tuned to reduce network and storage load. Cloud environments should start to repeat itself in software as storage and network managers need to know

Performance, like firewalls and storage duplication. The process of moving to the cloud has brought automation and standardization that can make it uncomfortable for those at work or those whose work is automated. Create good communication mechanisms, blameless and ensure that IT staff understands how much change is important to them and there will be more interesting work in the cloud waiting for them. IT blueprint has changed, the business has changed, cloud computing is a rich lens skills. Changing opinions, not changing technology, will go further and longer on a successful private cloud!