14 DAY TRIAL // Customers looking to demo a private Cloud leveraging Microsoft technologies, or just needing to put together a test environment before deciding to acquire the Redmond company’s solutions, can drastically reduce cost by taking advantage of free trial releases from the software giant. They’ll still need to have the actual hardware for the private Cloud, but all the Microsoft technologies required are available for download free of charge.
Products such as Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, SQL Server 2008 R2 x64, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Server Components and Administrator Console, and SCVMM Self Service Portal 2.0 are required.
Fortunately enough, IT professionals can also access the necessary guidance to simplify the work needed to build a free Microsoft private Cloud as much as possible.
The documentation offered Microsoft’s Chris E. Avis “will guide you through the process of setting up the bare minimum components to demo a Private Cloud environment using current release versions of Microsoft products and technologies.
“It is NOT meant for nor is it an ideal configuration for use in a production environment. If you have a Technet or MSDN subscription then you have all the software you need already. Otherwise you can download FREE TRIAL versions of all the necessary components from the Microsoft Technet Evaluation Center,” he added.
The guidance will help IT pros put together a basic private Cloud. Of course, additional technologies and hardware can be added into the mix to create a more powerful Cloud, capable of offering monitoring, reporting, enhanced management, deployment, etc.
“The resultant demo configuration does not provide for any failover or redundancy and is intended solely as a lightweight demo/test/learning environment,” Avis added.
“The concepts here can be used as a template to install a production Private Cloud, but please, do not implement this configuration in production without speaking to the appropriate persons that administer your network. If you implement this in production, you do so at your own risk and you should have an updated resume available.”