The rise of private clouds: all aspects of creating a private cloud

Although it is the spring of cloud computing development, many enterprises are still more willing to maintain control over the IT environment and physical resources. Under normal circumstances, laws and regulations may prevent a company from moving from a data center to a public cloud computing. Instead, the rise of private cloud computing has long allowed it to manage the hardware locally, while at the same time agreeing to the end user's remote logical access to the next logical step in the infrastructure.

While each IT environment is unique, there are many examples of lessons to be drawn from the planning to commissioning of private-owned private cloud computing projects, including the selection of the right management processes, hardware and software, and Suitable WAN and broadband technologies.

Management program selection and software license. Cloud computing technology is always centered on virtualization. The whole idea of ​​cloud computing is built on efficiency and agility. The first aspect of the technology lies in the management process, and there are currently three major vendors are competing for the top spot: VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. No single hypervisor option is best. Each product has its own set of similar features; choosing the right management program depends primarily on what your company's goals are.

Once IT managers have chosen a hypervisor, they must decide which resources to deliver via cloud computing. This decision involves a number of complex licensing and software considerations.

For example, when using Microsoft products, you need to identify a licensing model that best suits your user base. In some cases, a business license agreement may be the best choice. A cloud computing partner with professional licensing experience will help you choose the right level of licensing.

After choosing a hypervisor, there are additional considerations to building a private cloud computing, including:

• Application virtualization tools

• Quality of service software tools

• Monitoring software

• operating system

Copy software

• Other business-related software suites

Content delivery method. The delivery of workload is a very important issue that must be raised early in the planning of private cloud computing. How do you deliver cloud-based workloads to end-users? How the IT team answers this question often determines the hardware and software requirements needed for endpoint and private cloud computing.

Users connect to a private cloud to access applications and data; cloud computing architects must set a policy on how to authorize those cloud computing users to access it. For example, how does a media laze strategy be developed if end users are accessing a XenDesktop managed virtual desktop based on private cloud computing? How is the content present at the end-user or cloud computing server? What is the latency threshold?

When determining the best delivery method, cloud computing administrators must answer these questions positively. The most important part of a private cloud computing deployment is the end-user experience. End-user acceptance is often a "winner" for the successful implementation of private cloud computing.

Hardware selection. The foundation of cloud computing builds on efficiency; therefore, the word "efficiency" must always be borne in mind when making hardware decisions. In creating a stable private cloud computing, switching, storage, monitoring and network cabling all play an important role.

When IT teams plan their cloud computing environment, they often have to face a major hardware issue: Should I use a blade server or a rack server? The best answer is related to the systems you are running and the business characteristics. Because each environment is unique, choosing the right hardware depends on the specific application and the business needs. Some cloud computing managers like to use a blade server environment, while others vow to rack their servers.

Companies looking for agility and rapid capacity expansion may want to adopt blade servers. A single chassis can accommodate multiple blade servers with the lowest required configuration. When additional users need to join the environment, the blade server can quickly provision to host the load.

On the other hand, companies that know exactly where the end user environment will not grow can use rack servers. Because servers do not grow rapidly, it is sufficient to use a certain amount over a long period of time.

You must also make a few other hardware decisions before starting private cloud computing, including storage size, network configuration, and hardware monitoring:

• SAN size: Take the time to understand the needs of your cloud computing environment, which will benefit future system performance. When building private cloud computing, there are some questions to ask: how many users now have access to the system? What changes will happen to the number of users in a year? What types of applications will the enterprise use in the next 12 months and Database? Good storage size can reduce the impact of storage performance bottlenecks on the system.

• LAN considerations: Make sure you have a proper LAN connection to your private cloud computing environment. This means testing Fiber Channel and network speeds over Ethernet (FCoE) support. Does the environment require a 10 Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure? An enterprise can have some of the best servers in the data center; however, performance problems can arise if the switch can not handle the traffic.

• Monitoring: Often, you will need to use third-party hardware monitoring tools to manage and maintain high-level services in private cloud computing. Monitoring private cloud computing must continue to maintain the best performance of the environment.

WAN and broadband technologies. Depending on the size of your enterprise cloud computing infrastructure, you have several options for bandwidth technology. In order to establish your bandwidth requirements, you need to know how many users will be accessing the environment, what resources you will deliver through the cloud, and what characteristics of peak usage occur (eg, which period of the day the load is used, the application Program requirements, etc.). In many cases, businesses will choose between MPLS, optical circuits or carrier Ethernet services for their WAN connections.

By following these best practices, cloud administrators can design and launch a flexible private cloud. The goal of any cloud computing project is to create a stable environment that changes with business growth and IT needs.