Foundation for building your private cloud

Windows Server 2012: The foundation for building your private cloud

elivering a solid foundation for a private cloud requires a robust virtualization platform, scalability with great performance, and the ability

to span datacenters and integrate with other clouds. Windows Server 2012 was designed to address key private cloud needs through advances in computer, storage, and Network Virtualization.

Compute virtualization, provided by Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012, has been improved to support significantly larger host servers and guest virtual machines (VMs). This increases the range of workloads that can be virtualized. A new feature called Guest NUMA enables large virtual machines with many virtual CPUs (vCPUs) to achieve high performance by optimizing a VM’s vCPU mappings to the underlying physical server’s Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) configuration. Large increases in Hyper-V scalability and Dynamic Memory provide for much higher density of VMs per server with larger clusters. VM mobility through Live Migration and live storage migration, regardless of whether the VM is hosted on a cluster, enable a number of new scenarios for optimization of resources in private cloud scenarios.

Windows Server 2012 delivers new Network Virtualization capability as well as private virtual local area networks (VLANs), opening a number of new networking scenarios, including multi-tenant options required for hosting and private cloud scenarios. These technologies enable a tenant to utilize their own IP addressing schemes, even if it overlaps with other tenants, while maintaining separation and security. Win- dows Server 2012 also introduces a new extensible virtual switch. The extensible switch delivers new capabilities such as port profiles and is a platform that third parties can use to build switch extensions for tasks like traffic monitoring, intru-

sion detection, and network policy enforcement. In both private cloud scenarios

and hosting scenarios, secure multi-tenancy is often a requirement. Examples

could include separating the finance department’s resources from the engineering department’s resources or separating one company’s resource you are hosting from another’s. Windows Server 2012 networking technologies provide for shared infra- structure and resource pooling while enabling secure multi-tenancy.

Storage virtualization is a major investment area in Windows Server 2012. Storage Spaces, SMB 3, Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV2), and several other new storage features provide a high-performance, low-cost storage platform. This storage platform allows Hyper-V VMs to be run from Windows Server 2012 continuously available file shares on Windows storage spaces. Such shares can be accessed

using the new SMB 3 protocol, which when combined with appropriate network hardware, provides high-speed, low-latency, multichannel-capable storage access. These technologies provide a robust storage platform at a cost point much lower than was previously possible. For environments with significant existing investments in storage area network (SAN) technology, Windows Server 2012 now enables Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) to be virtualized, allowing VMs direct access to Fibre Channel–based SAN storage.

Another critical component of a private cloud infrastructure is disaster recovery capability. Windows Server 2012 introduces the Hyper-V Replica feature, which allows VMs to be replicated to disaster recovery sites, which reduces the time required to restore service should a primary datacenter suffer a disaster.

With the large number of new features and improvements, automation becomes a critical requirement, both for consistency of deployment and for efficiency in operations. Windows Server 2012 includes about 2,400 new Windows PowerShell cmdlets for managing the various roles and features in the platform. Windows PowerShell can be used either directly or through Microsoft and third-party management systems to automate deployment, configuration, and operations tasks. The new Server Manager in Windows Server 2012 allows multiple servers to be grouped and managed as one. The objective of these improvements is to increase

administrator efficiency by increasing the number of servers each administrator can

manage.

The range of technology delivered in Windows Server 2012 can be used in a variety of ways to enable private cloud scenarios. For a large, centralized enterprise,

large-scale file and Hyper-V clusters can deliver a platform able to run thousands or tens of thousands of highly available VMs. For cases where secure multi-tenancy is required, Network Virtualization and private VLANs can be used to deliver secure and isolated networks for each tenant’s VMs. With continuously available file shares for storing VMs combined with Live Migration and Live Storage Migration, VMs can be moved anywhere in the datacenter with no downtime.

The compute, network, and storage virtualization provided by Windows Server 2012 deliver resource pooling, elasticity, and measured service cloud attributes. These capabilities are further improved by disaster recovery and automation technologies. With these and other features, Windows Server 2012 delivers the foundation for the private cloud.

David Ziembicki

Senior Architect, U.S. Public Sector, Microsoft Services