Configuring and deploying Microsoft's Private Cloud

This module explains how enterprise data centers are evolving toward highly virtualized infrastructures. It explains how System Center 2012 gives you a set of tools to configure and deploy Infrastructure resources and manage the environment; both the underlying physical infrastructure and the virtualized infrastructure. This module will show you how to use System Center to build a private cloud that aligns with the Microsoft cloud and data center management vision, to deliver common management experiences across private and public clouds. The module illustrates how to deliver IT as a service on your terms with flexible management across your hybrid cloud environments.

In this module you will learn the benefits of monitoring and operating virtualized infrastructure services in System Center 2012. As well, you will understand the benefits of using services in System Center 2012. Through this module, you will see how using System Center 2012 to provision your private cloud infrastructure and applications can deliver a flexible and cost-effective infrastructure. This module will teach you the basics of deploying and upgrading your virtual environment, the fundamentals of fabric management, and private cloud operating scenarios. By learning the fundamentals of building and delegating clouds, you will be able to better provision and optimize your application services and virtualization management practices.

This module explains how to build a private cloud, with specific focus on individual infrastructure components that enable this. It explains how System Center 2012 gives you a set of tools to configure and deploy infrastructure components including compute, storage, network, and cluster resources. It will show you how to use System Center to build a private cloud, discussing advanced topics such as bare-metal deployment of compute resources, optimizing storage components, and creating logical networks in the private cloud.

This module explains how to build a private cloud, with specific focus on individual infrastructure components that enable this. It explains how System Center 2012 gives you a set of tools to monitor and operate your infrastructure components, enabling you to keep your infrastructure components up and running. We further explain how to understand your infrastructure through performance monitoring, as well as how to optimize the health of your infrastructure. These practices will enable you to monitor applications deployed in your private cloud and on Windows Azure, further allowing you to increase overall data center availability.

This module will show you how to use System Center to design a private cloud that aligns with the Microsoft cloud and application management vision. This vision will deliver standardization of your service and request offerings, as well as standardizing your automation process. Further, we will illustrate Microsoft’s approach to self-service delivery. Specifically showing you examples of how to use the new portal functionality in System Center 2012, to empower your end users to request service offerings based on their role in the organization. Then we will detail how the approval and delivery of these offerings occurs.

This module builds on the previous module, and further explains the advanced monitoring and operating functionality of two key System Center components, Orchestrator and Service Manager. This will show how IT Pros will gain end-to-end visibility into the automated processes that make their private clouds. Further, to ensure accurate and timely responses to end-user service requests, we will review System Center’s new service level agreement functionality. This provides the IT Pro with expedited methods to challenging operational issues such as release, incident and change management. Part of this module will be dedicated to new reporting functionality that allows the IT Pro to maintain a consistent window into the private cloud using System Center’s business intelligence and dashboard capability.

This module explains the concept of application services and covers the types of services available to you, as well as the basic steps needed to configure and deploy that service. You’ll learn how to use new tools in System Center 2012 to manage the underlying resources of an application using the service template model, and how to delegate control and access to those templates. We’ll also how to work with developers to optimize applications for service-level monitoring across both private and public clouds.

In this module you will learn new ways to operate and manage applications and workloads using the service template paradigm. New tools in System Center 2012 will allow for improved performance and monitoring of your applications. You’ll learn how to keep your applications running healthy and how to quickly re-allocate resources to ensure they continue to be healthy in the case of unforeseen problems or new requirements. You’ll see how these new tools can radically decrease the time required to resolve problems by giving IT administrators the ability to drill down to the performance characteristics of individual virtual and physical service resources, as well as at the code level. See how System Center 2012 will provide this new level of insight into the applications your organization depends upon to do business, and how you can use that insight not just to keep those applications running smoothly, but to make them perform at a new level.