The Journey to the Private Cloud

Today customers can begin their journey to the private cloud by deploying the Microsoft products and technologies they know and trust. The flexible and familiar platform and tools you use today will become the foundation for your private cloud. Going forward, Microsoft will deliver richer private cloud capabilities for your use in subsequent releases of Windows Server and System Center.

Evolving Your Datacenters to Derive Cloud Benefits Today

Microsoft is enabling customers to build the foundation for private cloud infrastructure using Windows Server/Hyper-V and the System Center family of products with the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 (previously known as the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit). Click here to download the release candidate.

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 is a free, partner-extensible toolkit that will enable datacenters to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage virtualized resources to enable Infrastructure-as-a-Service. This solution will deliver:

  • Tested guidance and best practices to help configure and deploy private cloud infrastructures.
  • Automated web portals and infrastructure provisioning engine that’s integrated with System Center.
  • Guidance to help partners easily extend functionality.

Today, customers can also leverage Dynamic Datacenter Alliance (DDA) offerings from service providers (Microsoft hosting partners) to extend their on-premises private clouds in a secure manner. These service providers use the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters (DDTK-H), which is also built on top of Windows Server/Hyper-V and System Center, thus enabling a consistent off- premises cloud capability to tap into. There are more than 63 hosters that have live DDA offerings as of today, while over 100 others have offerings in the pipeline.

Overview

VMMSSP (also referred to as the self-service portal) is a fully supported, partner-extensible solution built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center VMM. You can use it to pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside your datacenter. VMMSSP includes a pre-built web-based user interface that has sections for both the datacenter managers and the business unit IT consumers, with role-based access control. VMMSSP also includes a dynamic provisioning engine. VMMSSP reduces the time needed to provision infrastructures and their components by offering business unit “on-boarding,” infrastructure request and change management. The VMMSSP package also includes detailed guidance on how to implement VMMSSP inside your environment.

Important: VMMSSP is not an upgrade to the existing VMM 2008 R2 self-service portal. You can choose to deploy and use one or both self-service portals depending on your requirements.

The self-service portal provides the following features that are exposed through a web-based user interface:

  • Configuration and allocation of datacenter resources: Store management and configuration information related to compute, network and storage resources as assets in the VMMSSP database.
  • Customization of virtual machine actions: Provide a simple web-based interface to extend the default virtual machine actions; for example, you can add scripts that interact with Storage Area Networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines.
  • Business unit on-boarding: Standardized forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal.
  • Infrastructure request and change management: Standardized forms and human-driven workflow that results in reducing the time needed to provision infrastructures in your environment.
  • Self-Service provisioning: Supports bulk creation of virtual machines on provisioned infrastructure through the web-based interface.Helps business units to manage their virtual machines based on delegated roles.