System Center as a Private Cloud: TechEd 2011

Kenon Owens, technical product manager on the System Center and Virtualization and Forefront Team at Microsoft, gave the first technical session Sunday at the Reviewers' Workshop at TechEd in Atlanta. The session mainly focused on using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to create a private cloud.

Owens said IT pros have told him that cloud computing is giving other parts of companies ways to get what they want without IT. "They say, 'Our business units are going around us,'" Owens said. "'They think we're getting in the way.'"

He said the solution to this problem is for IT shops to move to the private cloud infrastructures. This way IT can allocate it's resources better—at a service (such as a stock trading application) level, not a server level. To help with this, Microsoft is updating all of its System Center products.

"We want to get that all out at the same time for our customers," Owens said.

Owens said that the goal of the new version of VMM was to let you treat Hyper-V servers as appliances that are managed by VMM.

The new System Center will handle Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX in addition to Hyper-V. While System Center won't have quite the same amount of capabilities when it's using these hypervisors—it can only bare-metal provision Hyper-V—but Owens said System Center won't treat the others as second-class citizens.

The beta of VMM is already available—visit this Microsoft site to download it.