Q: As a Windows administrator, what does private cloud computing mean to me?

A: Don't worry if you're feeling left out in all this private cloud discussion. You have been. Right now, the concepts surrounding private cloud, such as resource quantification, flexibility, and scalability, haven't been directly translated into the buttons and checkboxes you use every day. As a result, the whole notion of a private cloud remains a little, well, cloudy.

This said, there are some technologies available now that you're probably already using that meet private cloud computing's goals. VMware's vMotion, High Availability, and Dynamic Resource Scheduler, for example, let your VMs operate resiliently anywhere inside your LAN. The same is true for Hyper-V's Live Migration and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). More advanced technologies, such as VMware's vCloud Director and some of the new features anticipated in VMM go even further.

So hold tight for now. Private cloud computing is closer to a tangible product that you can touch, see, and feel than you might imagine.