Overview of Microsoft Private Cloud and System Center 2012

We have seen how organizations have evolved from Physical to Virtual to Private Cloud to Public Cloud. From Microsoft’s perspective, there are four tenets to cloud computing:

Pooled resources: Your data center resources, compute, network and storage should be thought as one single pool.

Self-service: once resources all pooled, they can be offered to the enterprise through a self-service portal that allows a user to request resources.

Elastic: Provides flexibility that helps in building automation and workflow to expand data center resources, scale up or down as required by the application or the workflow.

Usage-based: Monitor where the capacity is being consumed for chargeability purposes.  

The private cloud gives more control and customizability to achieve SLA and build a private cloud by using existing infrastructure in your data center.

How System Center 2012 enables the Microsoft Private Cloud

In a modern computing environment, most challenging job is how to manage software and hardware in such a way that it should be available when they’re needed. This goal inherently becomes complex when question comes for managing a multi-vendor distributed environment.

Microsoft’s System Center provides an integrated management solution that help organizations in managing their data centers efficiently and effectively. To understand this in a better way, we should first know that system management challenges and System Center address those problems:

Challenge: Software should be automatically installed, updated and patched. Also, maintaining up-to-date descriptions of the software and hardware in the environment.

Solution System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), earlier known as System s Management Server (SMS), allows in automation of software installation and managing system configurations.

Challenge: Monitoring the health of the systems, hardware and software in a distributed system, then report the issues and fix them by tools.

Solution: System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), earlier known as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) allows IT staff to monitor software, hardware, networking layer and application layer.

Challenge: Use standard processes for system management that relies on process-oriented approach. Offering automated support for common management processes, such as those defined by the ITIL, can improves the quality of systems management.

Solution System Center Service Manager (SCSM) allows in getting all the data to one place, the CMDB, for executing Incident, Change and Problem management.

Challenge: Using least expensive technologies for backing and restoring of data.

Solution Data Protection Manager (DPM) is used to backup and restore a wide range of Microsoft products, like SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint.

Challenge: Tools for creating and managing the virtual machines so that more applications could easily be deployed on each machine.

Solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) helps in creating virtual machine and application templates that is used for deploying virtual machines and sequenced applications.

Challenge: Enterprise solution for protecting environment from malware or any other security threats

Solution System Center Endpoint Protection provides an antimalware and security solution for the Microsoft platform.

Challenge: Automate data center and IT processes, regardless of hardware and platform

Solution:System Center Orchestrator, earlier known as Opalis, provides a workflow managementsolution that offers integration with third-party management tools

Challenge: Organization should be proactively provided insight of misconfigured, unpatched, and unsupported server configuration

Solution System Center Advisor is a cloud service that regularly scans your environment and sends you report for the assessment.

Microsoft private cloud is more than virtualization. Virtualization is a critical foundation component; it provides rapid deployment, HA, isolation, consolidation and mobility. The private cloud provides self-service, usage-based metering, and the application insight.

Example of System Center Process Flow

Let me show you how different System Center products can be used for automation of provisioning the virtual machines.

Users open the self-service portal. Self-service portal is a user-friendly request portal where users can select the expanded cloud resources that they need. The available choices are defined by the templates that were configured using Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Once the request is submitted to Service Manager, it is logged with a Service ID, and it can either be manually approved, or set to automatically be fulfilled by using runbook automation in Orchestrator.

Here Orchestrator integrates with Virtual Machine Manager by way of an integration pack and prompts Virtual Machine Manager to provision new template for virtual machine resources to the designated private cloud.

How to move database between Instances using System Center

In a different example, let us see how System Center helps in moving the database between instances. System Center 2012 provides integration and automation capabilities that support auto-remediation of different disaster scenarios. Let’s say that SCOM investigated an error in the databases and you have decided to migrate that instance to some other healthy instance.

Orchestrator runbook designer is a very nice tool that is used in creating automated workflow to perform several tasks while integrating with all the necessary System Center components.

 In the below process workflow, you will see how different System Center components are used for moving the database to other instance.

·         The SQL Server migration runbook can either be started from within the Orchestratorconsole, or triggered by Orchestrator pulling the alert information from Operations Manager.

·         Once the process is kicked off, Orchestrator communicates with Virtual Machine Manager, and then Virtual Machine Manager checks for valid names of the source and destination servers, plus the database to be migrated.

·         Next, Orchestrator communicates with Service Manager to create an incident ID associated with the database migration, ensuring there’s a record of this process.

·         At this point, Data Protection Manager is pulled into the process to create a recovery point for the database and export it to a designated network share.

·         Now that the database is backed up, Orchestrator is going to kick off a Windows PowerShell script to run the actual database migration to the new SQL Server virtual machine.

·         Once the migration is complete, Operations Manager will be put into maintenance mode for the source server from which you migrated the database, so that when Virtual Machine Manager shuts it down, an error will not be thrown.

·         Once the source virtual machine is shut down, the associated incident logged in Service Manager will resolve.

I guess at this stage, you would have learnt a bit about automation using System Center 2012. We will discuss a lot in further articles on System Center 2012 products and how it helps us in building a private cloud, automation and monitoring etc.

Courtesy Link : http://systemcenter.learnmsexchange.com/system-center/1-overview-of-microsoft-private-cloud-and-system-center-2012