A private cloud is a cloud that is provisioned and managed on-premise by an organization. The private cloud is deployed using an organization’s own hardware to leverage the advantages of the private cloud model. Through VMM, an organization can manage the private cloud definition, access to the private cloud, and the underlying physical resources.
In VMM, a private cloud provides the following benefits:
Self service. Administrators can delegate management and usage of the private cloud while retaining the opaque usage model. Self-service users do not need to ask the private cloud provider for administrative changes beyond increasing capacity and quotas as their needs change.
Resource pooling. Through the private cloud, administrators can collect and present an aggregate set of resources, such as storage and networking resources. Resource usage is limited by the capacity of the private cloud and by user role quotas.
Opacity. Self-service users have no knowledge of the underlying physical resources.
Elasticity. Administrators can add resources to a private cloud to increase the capacity.
Optimization. Usage of the underlying resources is continually optimized without affecting the overall private cloud user experience.
You can create a private cloud from either of the following sources:
Host groups that contain resources from Hyper-V hosts, VMware ESX hosts and Citrix XenServer hosts
A VMware resource pool
During private cloud creation, you select the underlying fabric resources that will be available in the private cloud, configure library paths for private cloud users, and set the capacity for the private cloud. Therefore, before you create a private cloud, you should configure the fabric resources, such as storage, networking, library servers and shares, host groups, and hosts. For information about how to configure the fabric and add hosts to VMM management, see the following sections:
Example Scenario Overview
In the example scenarios, a private cloud that is named Finance is created from resources in configured host groups. A private cloud that is named Marketing is created from a VMware resource pool.
| Private Cloud | Resource |
|---|---|
Finance (Private cloud created from host groups) | Host groups: Seattle\Tier0_SEA, Seattle\Tier1_SEA, New York\Tier0_NY, New York\Tier1_NY Logical network: BACKEND Load balancer: LoadBalancer01.contoso.com VIP profile: Web tier (HTTPS traffic) Storage classification: GOLD and SILVER Read-only library shares: SEALibrary and NYLibrary Stored virtual machine path: VMMServer01\Finance\StoredVMs Capability profile: Hyper-V |
Marketing (Private cloud created from a VMware resource pool) | VMware resource pool: Resource pool 1 Logical network: BACKEND Load balancer: LoadBalancer01.contoso.com VIP profile: Web tier (HTTPS traffic) Read-only library shares: SEALibrary and NYLibrary Stored virtual machine path: VMMServer01\Marketing\StoredVMs Capability profile: ESX Server |