back to article How to build a perfect private cloud with Windows Server 2012

So you want to build a Microsoft-based private cloud. While using the latest software is not always the best move (never use version 1.0 of anything) Microsoft's 2012 stack of products is mature, stable and capable of meeting all your cloudy needs. Let's take a look at what's required for a private cloud in Microsoft's world …

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  1. steven W. Scott
    FAIL

    *....sigh....*

    MS? H.A.? Fault tolerant?

    Whatever.

    Security! Please escort the salesman out of building.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: *....sigh....*

      Oh look, someone who thinks that Windows is still 3.1 and hasn't updated his knowledge...

      Sigh, indeed.

  2. LordHighFixer
    Trollface

    best way to make a cloud with MS supplied stuff?

    very large quantities of, very fast, very hot, explosives...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For the recycling bin

    I've just come off a rather large _not_ perfect cloud project <in frustration>. While it all looks good on paper, once you start ramping up the load to below planned capacities things would go all pear shaped in inexplicable ways. Really. And the whole MS stack is so opaque when it comes to answering the question why rather than <how>, its just about impossible to get and traction in making thing right.

    But this post isn't opaque what-so-ever. When you take out the recyling your supposed to separated the glossy advertisements from the plain newsprint. This post falls in the the former catagory.

    Trever Pott, instead of schmoozing us with what you can do with this whizzy MS stack. Why don't you do a nice concrete report on an installed cloud application? Replace 'can' with 'is' and include numbers.

  4. W. Anderson

    This technical article has a great of "but.." regarding compromises for missing features and functionality normally found in the other more popular, more robust and more secure Cloud software technologies, meaning non-Microsoft based.

    Which begs the question. Why would any competent, knowledgeable and astute technology professional recommend and or use Microsoft Cloud technology over OpenStack for example, thus sacrificing reliability, scalability, security and costs savings - just to say it's from Microsoft? Remember, Microsoft is an "also ran" and far less competitive or of good value in this segment of technology than any other entity.

    To-date, January 14-2013, every major Microsoft Internet/Networking technology including Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and support services of SQL Server, and Windows Server 2012 can be quite literally replaced with alternatives, mostly Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) that has proven superior in every respect. Even for runnnig Microsoft Office with Outlook. Strange !

  5. Jeff 11
    WTF?

    "If someone wants to debate me, they had better come out with some strong engineering principles that might have a chance of contradicting my assertion that Windows is not fit to be a serious cloud."

    Number 1: You mentioned Hadoop, an *application* that's useful to few real world cloud projects. Not everything is about data mining.

    Number 2: Interoperability. If a customer uses an entire Windows ecosystem, you're just going to stick your own stack in there and then spend the rest of your days maintaining it separately. You're trading 'Microsoft lock in' for a paid salary or a support contract. Fantastic for the customer!

    Number 3: Your Powershell argument was out of date half a decade ago. It does what a shell is supposed to do - provide a syntactically consistent interface for an administrator to efficiently manage his systems. If you make the effort to learn it, it'll be as useful as your choice of UNIX shell.

    The only valid point you make is about licensing, which has nothing to do with engineering.

    As someone firmly in the Unix camp I don't enjoy Microsoft's success, but credit where credit's due - if Server was useless crap no-one would be using it. The only reason I wouldn't go near a Windows deployment is because it'd take me an order of magnitude longer to get the job done, but that's down to the shortcomings in my own skills.

  6. Stu J
    FAIL

    @Eadon

    Who the fuck do you work for, so I can make a note never to employ them to do any Solutions Architecture for me?

    1. James O'Shea

      Re: @Eadon

      "Who the fuck do you work for"

      Isn't it obvious? Microsoft, of course. He's certainly the best salesman for MS software that I've seen in a long time.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    let's face it, when ever is windows the RIGHT tool for the joib....

    Even when its the ONLY tool for the job :-)

  8. Dare to Think
    IT Angle

    Many thanks for this article, El Reg, and indeed many thanks Trevor Pott

    Now, please, for comparison, an article about building your private cloud using

    . Solaris Zones

    . LDOMs

    . IBM WPARs

    . IBM PowerVM

    . Oracle VM

    . VMware ESXi

    . RHEV

    . KVM on Ubuntu

    . or a mixture of the above

    Please together with licensing and maintenance factors and costs, hardware constraints and list of how many OSes that can be hosted, vertical scalability and high availability aspects, follow up licensing and maintenance costs resulting from that, security and privacy aspects etc.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SMB Direct

    Though it was mentioned in another recent Reg Server 2012 article, it was missed here where I think it most applies. Windows Server 2012 and its SMB 3.0 implementation comes with baked-in support for SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), as well as Windows Update-supplied drivers for commonly used Infiniband and Ethernet RDMA adapters.

    This brings a huge new performance dimension to all kinds of scenarios with Windows Server, especially the storage of Hyper-V guests, and can seamlessly switch back and forth between IP and RDMA as interfaces/fabrics come and go.

    No additional configuration needed, if the necessary hardware, drivers and fabric are in place, a regular SMB mount will switch to RDMA transport (massive speed boost while lowering CPU utilization). I mean, why wouldn't you?

    Not only the fastest files-over-RDMA solution fully baked into an OS, but the easiest to work with... IMO a big feather in Microsoft's cap and quite unsung by the tech community so far. If you buy into Windows storage and Hyper-V and consider them "reliable enough" for your needs, you can build an insanely fast private cloud solution for a steal.

    No bias here... I'm a consultant that regularly works with Linux, Windows, VMware, Solaris, BSD, etc. using storage from vendors large and small or built with open solutions. Just drawing attention to a compelling option Windows admins probably want to look into!

    1. Lusty

      Re: SMB Direct

      RDMA is all well and good if you have the HBAs and fabric already, but even if you do have the required hardware you still can't put Exchange databases on a virtual disk using SMB 3 so most companies using Hyperv will still need a proper SAN environment since they will almost certainly be running Exchange if they have Hyperv!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: SMB Direct

        That's what block RDMA is for, easy to add initiator support with OpenFabrics drivers... e.g. SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol) or iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA). There are both commercial and open source targets available.

    2. Cloud is Crap
      IT Angle

      Re: SMB Direct

      This is a great feature but these adapters are not commonly used yet.... iMHE

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: SMB Direct

        Not commonly in use in most enterprises, but used by the tens of thousands in HPC environments. Generally much cheaper than FC or 10GigE, as well, and anyone who wants to try it out on the cheap can eBay everything in a jiffy.

  10. Warren 2

    Why Would someone build a private cloud?

    I have found dozens of examples of people making good use of virtualisation. Some examples of people incorporating on demand, self service type interfaces. I have even found one or two organisations that are starting to test pay as you use cost models.

    None of these are private clouds.

    On the worst end of the spectrum I have come across “Private Cloud” projects in Government organisations for which the business case reads something along the lines of “We will buy heaps of servers, we will use VMware, and we will be cloudy”! Even if these projects condensed water vapour from the atmosphere until precipitation occurred you still couldn’t call them private clouds.

    I am beginning to form the view that Private cloud is a seriously dangerous concept, proposed by fearful IT organisations that want to be seen to be leading edge but aren’t prepared to give up the chattels of traditional enterprise IT.

    Maybe we should start to stigmatise the words “Private Cloud”. Maybe we should force people to use the word Hypervisvirtualisondemandify instead; it would make them feel as silly saying it as the concept truly is.

    If you could build a private cloud and out-compete Amazon (or any other public cloud provider) on price then go right ahead, otherwise put the money towards something more useful.

    1. The Original Steve

      Re: Why Would someone build a private cloud?

      If it scales, performs and functions in the same manner as what the marketing types call a 'cloud' - but the whole stack is owned by your company then who cares?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why Would someone build a private cloud?

      The word "Private" in the expression generally tends to denote an acknowledgement that Cloud concepts are by nature rather fluffy when it comes to where the data resides, which is one of the primary weaknesses of the whole "Cloud" idea in the first place.

      Given that "Cloud" is by itself such a fantastically vague concept that it can be used by all and sundry (read: clueless managers, politicians and sales staff) without exposing their serious lack of knowledge, "Private" Cloud is simply a flag on the concept that says "if you built this thingimajig, for God's sake make sure we don't end up handing off data to the competition/government/any old hacker that comes along" - usually only because the speaker in question is vaguely aware that there may be some compliance thing floating around that might impact their budget, promotion or reputation if things go wrong (no, impact on clients don't usually feature in that equation).

      Thus, from a marketing perspective we are presently building a *very* Private Cloud in a particular country, from a tech perspective it's a redundant, high end, 2 data centre setup with the full works on security surveillance, APT detection and seriously competent people to run it, with most of the controls 4 eyes, log anonymisation where we could manage it and *very* precise definition of what information is stored where. From a legal perspective it is a single entry with a clearly defined set of legal obligations and a container of confidentiality that encompasses the entire supplier chain, with the whole shooting match an exclusively local affair to avoid legislative subsidiary backdoors. Again, nothing fluffy about that either.

      Personally, I hate this "cloud" BS with a deep purple passion, but you need to speak the lingo to get through to decision makers - only after uttering that Open Sesame phrase will they start taking in the rest of the information. If you speak tech to start with, they will go with the well dressed chap who doesn't scare them but who has never been closer to a secure system than his car when he forgot his keys in his office.

      /sarcasm

      1. Lusty

        Re: Why Would someone build a private cloud?

        The term Cloud when used in IT context is not vague, NIST have a definition on their website which the majority of vendors adhere to. It's only 7 pages long with only 2 of them being the actual definition yet the vast majority of IT people are unaware of it and refer to cloud as an undefined nonsense. NIST is American, yes, but so is the majority of the industry in terms of vendor so this is the one to use.

        http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

  11. M7S
    Stop

    A small business IT department writes with regard to the debate about Windows

    A couple of comments state that Windows is only for small businesses with no IT department. I guess that could include the business for which I work some of the time. Circa 35 users, 2/3 of those overseas using virtual desktops and most applications fairly vanilla (a bit of Word, Excel etc).

    I'd love to consider alternatives that might be cheaper and easier to administer but then the whole setup becomes so fragmented as to require multiple vendors for support with the inevitable finger pointing when something doesn't play nicely with something else despite everything supposedly being "standard".

    It's all very well those of you who are uber-programmers or work for massive corporates with extensive departments, skillsets, laboratories etc performing your digital wizardry but most businesses in the UK employing most people tend to be smallish and we just don't have the ability, time or money to do all of that. Outsourcing fills us with the heebie-jeebies for various regulatory and reputational reasons and there have been enough comments elsewhere on this site over years about how sales will promise anything and then leave it to the techs to see if it can be made to work. The stuff we're after has been around for long enough that it should be "consumer simple" enough to set up by now. We'd just like something that we can install on our own server(s) and tick through the various sensibly set up option/configuration menus to get it set up the way we want. (e.g. secure by default, not requiring a swat/tiger team to then tell us how to harden it). We don't have command line skills in the same way as when most customers go to a bank they are not expected to get the calculators out for a semi-annually compounded discount to yield to work out their 25 year mortgage repyaments. Simple GUI would be nice too.

    If there are other offerings that provide a server OS, mail "exchange" (and support for e.g. blackberry server), mail and web filtering, file, print and can serve virtual desktops (with reasonable security) to users both locally and remotely, and are relatively user friendly to fix should a problem occur then I'd be grateful for details.

    If not then for all you writing about how we should use linux over Windows etc, there's customers waiting. Lots of us. Get something that meets our needs and sell to us before we all fall prey to the big outsourcers and you end up going the way of HMV.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A small business IT department writes with regard to the debate about Windows

      There's a small UK outfit called Forget About It (yes, seriously) which gives businesses of your size exactly what they need. Their whole setup is based on Linux, they support VPN access in all sorts of formats and I think they have groupware as well, and it's all hands-off from your perspective to the point that they even do a backup for you every day and make your data disaster proof (you have an automatic offsite backup).

      What they do NOT do, however, is run your website but there are plenty of other companies for that. It shows in their SEO, I had to do some digging to find their URL :). See forgetaboutit.net.

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