Building a private cloud with System Center 2012: Part 1

Microsoft's much-changed System Center 2012 includes a refresh of all the components, led by Virtual Machine Manager — which, among other new features, can now be used to manage platforms besides Microsoft's own Hyper-V. System Center Orchestrator, the workflow automation tool, also comes in for a revamp, and there's a totally new application —App Controller — for template-controlled self-service access to private and public cloud resources.

The 'cloud' word appears a lot in relation to the new suite, as System Center 2012 is positioned as a platform for deploying and managing private cloud infrastructures. More specifically, it's seen as an enabler for companies seeking to build their own private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.

To support this, Microsoft has released what it calls the Private Cloud Evaluation Software bundle, containing all the bits of System Center 2012 needed to create and evaluate a private cloud infrastructure of your own. Which is exactly what we opted to do, with the following results.

Committed testers only

The first thing to note is that setting up a Microsoft private cloud is a far from trivial exercise and definitely not something for the faint hearted. As we quickly discovered, not only do you need decent server hardware and a reasonable degree of technical ability, you also need lots of time. What's more, it helps if you can think on your feet and solve problems yourself rather than expect to be spoon-fed a quick and easy solution, as that's definitely not what you get.

Going prepared

Assuming you have the tenacity to see the project through, getting hold of the necessary software is one of the easiest of the tasks involved. However, even that wasn't entirely straightforward.

Available to download from the Microsoft TechNet Evaluation Center, the Private Cloud Evaluation Software bundle comprises most of the components that make up System Center 2012 — but not all, and certainly not in a final polished format. This gives rise to a number of difficulties when it comes to deployment, which we'll cover shortly.

Our download included the following System Center 2012 components:

·         Orchestrator

·         Virtual Machine Manager

·         App Controller

·         Operations Manager

·         Configuration Manager (not required for the private cloud evaluation)

·         Service Manager

·         Data Protection Manager

Endpoint protection isn't needed but an (incomplete) evaluation guide is provided, along with a unified installer developed specifically for testing the Microsoft private cloud solution.

You also need Windows Server 2008 R2, so an optional 180-day evaluation copy is available to download, complete with Hyper-V to provide the required virtualisation platform.

Depending on the approach taken, you'll need to deploy this up to eight times — which, as it's a Microsoft product, could be costly. This won't deter customers with volume licensing agreements or those with TechNet or MSDN subscriptions. Alternatively, you can rearm the 10-day activation period, using a provided script, to continue with the evaluation. You can do this up to five times, which isn't perfect but does work — although we're not quite sure how it adds up to 180 days of evaluation. Fortunately everything else is covered with no extra licensing needed.

Machines: real and virtual

In terms of hardware, the evaluation guide reckons you can get away with just one physical server, so long as it's got at least four processors plus enough memory and disk space to host up to eight VMs, as shown in the diagram below:

Microsoft's Private Cloud Evaluation Software bundle requires at least one physical server and up to eight VMs, all running Windows Server 2008 R2

We'd recommend a newish server, and for our tests we opted to use two — an existing system configured as an Active Domain Controller plus a second, more powerful, system that we used as a Hyper-V host to run everything else.

Our main server had eight cores and 18GB of RAM, along with 500GB of RAID storage. We installed Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role on this system, opting for the full OS rather than Server Core. Next, using Hyper-V Manager, we built a new VM with two CPUs, 2GB of memory and a 40GB hard disk, onto which we installed Windows Server 2008 R2.

We used Sysprep to get this template VM ready for duplication before manually copying it and running through the setup procedure on each copy to build the seven virtual servers we required.