Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

Working with System Center App Controller 2012

This is not a typo; the App Controller installer is indeed 11MB. When is the last time you saw a Microsoft server product that could be installed from a few floppy disks?

System Center App Controller is a very thin installation. It can be installed on the System Center Virtual Machine Management server, but for busy environments better performance will be gained by running App Controller on its own server. App Controller does use an SQL Server database for its configuration storage, but the rest of its requirements are very light and the install media is around 11MB at the time of writing. System Center App Controller delivers a web-based Silverlight experience that provides access to both private clouds provided by System Center Virtual Machine Manager and public cloud services such as Windows Azure, as shown in Figure 10-18.

Figure 10-18: The Clouds screen of SC App Controller, showing my private clouds and public clouds

The Application Is What Matters

Note that the name of this component is System Center App Controller, not System Center Virtual Machine Controller. Remember, the focus of the private cloud is the application, not an operating system instance, which is typically what we mean when we talk about virtual machines. That does not mean SC App Controller cannot deploy individual virtual machines. It can do so easily and ...