14 DAY TRIAL // With the introduction of Hyper-V Cloud Microsoft now emphasizes that it owns the most comprehensive collection of Cloud offerings available on the market today.
At TechEd Europe 2010, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Management and Security Division revealed that Hyper-V Cloud comes to provide customers looking to embrace cloud computing with yet another alternative on top of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Platform Appliances which have been announced for some time now.
Essentially, there are no more excuses for companies not to jump into the Cloud. Microsoft is making available Platform as a Service, Software as Service and Infrastructure as a Service.
Hyper-V Cloud complements existing Cloud offerings from the Redmond company such as Windows Azure and Windows Azure Private Appliance, democratizing the building and deployment of private cloud infrastructures.
What this means is that customers will be able to access a range of resources from Microsoft and its partners in order to implement private clouds with their organizations as fast as possible and with very little risk.
At the heart of Hyper-V is, as you might have already guessed the company’s hypervisor, which is included by default into the last iteration of Windows Server.
But of course, the virtualization technology goes hand in hand with Windows Server 2008 R2.
Moreover, on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, the Hyper-V Cloud also involves Microsoft System Center.
According to Anderson, Microsoft has inked agreements with no less than six hardware vendors in order to supply customers not only with prevalidated infrastructure for their deployments but also with additional services.
“Many of our customers have told us they want the benefits of Cloud computing – fast deployment, increased agility, lower costs – but with tight control over things like physical infrastructure and security policies,” Anderson explained.
“Our new private cloud offerings fulfill that need at the infrastructure level, while providing a clear migration path to Cloud services at the platform level.”
The Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program
Microsoft partnered with Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, and NEC in order to offer customers what the Anderson referred to as choice in terms of private Clouds.
Organizations can leverage predefined, validated configurations from the software giant and its partners noted above, through the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program.
The reference architectures cover all the aspects of building and deploying a private Cloud from computer to storage, but also networking, virtualization and management.
One example of the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program in action is the partnership between the Redmond company and HP.
The two companies have deployed together the HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V, mixing together the HP BladeSystem Matrix servers, with System Center and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
Furthermore, HP is keen on getting customers up and running as fast as possible, and through the HP CloudStart for Hyper-V it promises that private Clouds can be launched within 30 days.
Additional Hyper-V Cloud programs
With the Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider program, in excess of 70 service providers worldwide working with Microsoft are offering customers infrastructure as a hosted service.
Companies such as Korean Internet Data Center, Fasthosts, Agarik and Hostway are enabling organizations to implement both private and public Clouds fast and with reduced costs.
Hyper-V Cloud Deployment Guides will be offered for those companies that will focus on making the best of the infrastructure that they already have in place in order to build private clouds.
Anderson promised that guidance will be available through Microsoft Consulting Services, which in its turn will be leveraging extensive expertise from previous MCS customer engagements.
In addition, the software giant will offer further help for organizations looking to embrace the Cloud through the Hyper-V Cloud accelerate program.
Both customers and partners will receive fund assessments but also help with proofs of concept and with the actual deployment into production environments from MCS, as well as from members of the Microsoft Partner Network.
Fact is that Microsoft is still not offering its Cloud platform for private Cloud deployments, but at the same time the company is doing it all save for actually allowing customers to deploy Windows Azure in their own datacenters.