Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

What Is a Private Cloud?

In order to talk about the private cloud, it’s helpful to have a working definition and a common set of assumptions about the type of solution it provides. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, you can think of the private cloud as a form of IT infrastructure having the following attributes:

• It is both scalable and elastic, meaning it can grow and shrink as the load on the application changes.
• It enables better utilization of resources.
• Its functionality is independent of the underlying fabric.
• Because it is accountable, it can also be chargeable!
• It offers self-service capabilities.
• It is focused on the application.

Although you might not log on to the actual console of a server, you are still remoting directly into the operating system to perform management tasks, which is basically still managing at the console level.

Beginning in reverse order, consider what it means to say that the private cloud is focused on the application. When you think about the shift from physical to virtual, what really happened? In the physical world, each physical server has a single operating system instance, which translates into a lot of wasted resources and money. The shift to virtualization consolidates these operating system instances into a smaller number of physical servers by running each operating system instance in a virtual machine. Although virtualization saves hardware and money, it doesn’t actually change the way IT is managed. Administrators still ...