Joel's SharePoint Architecture Blog

SharePoint Server, SharePoint Online and Office 365 Training, Architecture, Administration and Development

Microsoft and the Private Cloud

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Azure, Office 365, Dynamics On-Demand CRM – all of these are cloud services from Microsoft. We know the benefits – cloud services take the concept of hosting an application – or running your applications – and erecting a huge Somebody Else’s Problem field around it. Maintenance, scaling, feeding and watering all become problems that are Somebody Else’s. In that case, Microsoft’s, running in their Public Cloud.

But what if you can’t countenance the thought of your data being in Somebody Else’s hands? If your applications and data are sufficiently secret and confidential that you just have to keep them inside the firewall, then you can still take advantage of the cloud philosophy, and go for a Private Cloud.

One really cool example of application fabric for the Private Cloud is Microsoft’s on-premise Azure appliances.

This video from Microsoft discusses the ethos behind the Private Cloud, and how the virtualisation tools that we already use can make the Private Cloud a reality.

For more details check out the Microsoft Private Cloud portal (http://bit.ly/ff1w3C), System Center Virtual Machine Manager self service portal (http://bit.ly/e3vgyG) and Hyper-V (http://bit.ly/ikrKGw).

Consolidating SharePoint Servers with Hyper-V – Identifying Suitable Candidates

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If you have an existing SharePoint server farm – or any other kind of server farm on a Windows platform – one of the challenges you might face is identifying which servers could be suitable candidates for consolidating into virtual servers.

Luckily, there’s an app for that! Smile Check out the new Microsoft Solution Accelerator: Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) for server consolidation.

You can install it on a Windows 2008R2 server, such as your Hyper-V server, but you should note that it requires the ASP.NET 3.5 server role and and a suitable SQL edition installed (e.g. SQL Express 2005 SP3 or greater should do the trick).

The MAP tool creates an Inventory Database of suitable servers that it discovers on your estate. It collects all this information, but does this without needing to install additional agent software on your servers.

This seems pretty clever, and is achieved using a combination of Windows Remote Management and the Remote Registry service. The only requirements are that you’re local administrator on the servers you want to inventory, and you have WMI and file/print exceptions in your Windows Firewall rules.

The result of the process is a report that shows all physical machines and how suitable they are for virtualisation. It even checks hardware attached to the machines, whether they can support 64 bit OSes, and with Virtual Machine Discovery it also tells you what other virtual machines exist within your estate.

The tool will even export the report as an Excel spreadsheet for you to take away and analyse.

Gordon Ryan from those TechNet chaps has put together another video walking you through the process.