Microsoft Overview of Azure features, Services and comon uses
Microsoft Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
You can build applications using any language, tool,or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Microsoft Four primary models for building and running apps :
In June 2013, I was introducing the Dell PowerEdge VRTX for Hybrid Cloud with System Center 2012 SP1 Suite with a video and a Hyper-V 2012 Reference Architecture guide. You can find that blogpost here
Now the Dell PowerEdge VRTX All-In-The-Box Solution works great together with Microsoft Cloud :
4ward is pleased to offer the first appliance for the Cloud on the market, specifically designed for both Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and for organizations with offices, departments or branch offices. A solution that once the first setup is completed is fully supported by Dell, 24×7, through their ProSupport services, for the Windows components and by Microsoft for the System Center part, it is based on an unique infrastructure in the industry: Dell PowerEdge VRTX, a converged system that can enable any organization to implement a Data Center with a solution in-a-box, even within an office.
Thanks to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2, and the intellectual property of 4ward customers can order and receive a private Cloud solution that will be deployed at the first boot of the system with the help of a wizard. Just as easily could be extended to a public Cloud, creating a hybrid solution. Through the Cloud in-a-box appliance, workloads and services will get geographical high availability, scale up and scale down features, always letting the characteristics of the IT infrastructure perfectly adhere
business needs, even if for intense and short periods of time.
All this at the cost of a virtualization infrastructure.
Here you see more detailed technical information of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX :
All in One Box
With Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2
You are ready for Microsoft Cloud OS.
With this Big Datacenter in a Little box you got a lot of benefits :
Reduce costs like power consumption
Flexible in moving
Datacenter Rackspace
Microsoft Cloud OS
Software Defined Networking will do the rest for you 🙂
For Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s) and Educational institutes you can build now Twin Datacenters for disasterrecovery with Hyper-V Recovery manager (Microsoft Azure) for low costs.
You Need two Dell PowerEdge VRTX
With all the possibilities of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX I can recommend every SME company this sollution Cloud in a Box.
Here you see the Dell PowerEdge VRTX with Microsoft and 4ward making a Private Cloud in One Hour.
The Microsoft Cloud OS
Cloud computing is happening. It is being driven by the exponential growth in modern applications, data and devices. These trends require organizations to quickly scale and deliver continuous services. Simultaneously, innovation is happening across storage, network and compute technologies. With these new requirements and innovations, IT is under pressure to deliver capacity on demand, whether for short-term projects or longer-term initiatives. At the same time, organizations have higher expectations for service levels – services must be always up, always on, with no planned or unplanned downtime. To meet these challenges, a new modern platform is required. In the era of cloud computing, Microsoft delivers this with the Cloud OS. The Cloud OS takes on a broader role than just managing a server. Microsoft’s vision for the Cloud OS is focused on the transformation of the datacenter, enabling modern applications, unlocking insights on any data and empowering people-centric IT.
The Cloud OS requires a comprehensive execution of vision crossing a wide range of enterprise technologies, including Microsoft Azure, SQL Server, System Center and Windows Server.
Fundamental to the modern datacenter, is the ability to build private cloud infrastructures and quickly scale within the datacenter as well as agile and secure consumption of Microsoft Azure and service provider cloud capacity.
Replication and recovery to Azure
You can further simplify your disaster recovery protection by replicating to Azure and still benefit from the simplicity, automation, customizable recovery plans, health monitoring, and orchestrated recovery the service provides. One of the primary roadblocks to comprehensive protection of applications is the expense of establishing and maintaining a secondary site for disaster recovery. Now Azure can be your disaster recovery site.
Continuous Health Monitoring
Site Recovery monitors the state of System Center Virtual Machine Manager clouds continuously and remotely from Azure. When replicating between two sites you control, only the Virtual Machine Manager servers communicate directly with Azure – your virtual machines data and replication remains on your networks. All communication with Azure is encrypted. When replicating to Azure as the secondary site, your data is encrypted and you can also select encryption for data at-rest.
Orchestrated Recovery
The service helps automate the orderly recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter. Virtual machines can be brought up in an orchestrated fashion to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads. Recovery plans are simple to create through the Azure management portal, where they are stored. The plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand, including the execution of custom Windows PowerShell scripts and pauses for manual interventions. Networks can also be customized by mapping virtual networks between the primary and recovery sites. These plans can be tested whenever you like without disrupting the services at your primary location.
Extend your datacenter into the cloud
Azure Virtual Network easily extends your on-premises network through a secure site-to-site VPN, much the way you’d set up and connect to a remote branch office. You control the network topology, including configuration of DNS and IP address ranges, and manage it just like your on-premises infrastructure. ExpressRoute allows you to securely add compute and storage capacity to your existing datacenter. With high throughput and fast latencies, Azure will feel like a natural extension to your datacenter so you enjoy the scale and economics of the public cloud without having to compromise on network performance.
You can find a lot of information on the blogsite of Microsoft Corporate Vice President Enterprise & Client Mobility Brad Anderson about HybridCloud Success Series : Link to table of Contents: Success with Hybrid Cloud.
With the ambient credo to “do more with less, with a better agility and time to market”, IT inevitably becomes a service provider for its enterprise and need to run like a business. The undertaking also requires a step further in the way the IT delivers its services to its customers: internal businesses and beyond. IT has indeed to deliver the services in an industrialized way for greater speed and lower cost. This requires increasing their overall core infrastructure operational maturity in two main areas.
The first one aims at improving the management of their own on-premises IT landscape and traditional services by evolving towards a private cloud, i.e. an optimized and more automated way to provision and operate (a catalog of) services for businesses. The second one consists in enhancing their service offerings by utilizing off-premises public cloud augmentations (for acceptable cases of use) as (lower-cost) add-ons to existing services in the catalog.
The combination and interaction of these two cloud paradigms results in the emergence of the hybrid cloud which meets the demands and the expectations of the business. Hybrid cloud spans the two above implementations. A service request can be instantiated in either implementation, or moved from one to another, or can horizontally grow between the two implementations (cloud bursting for instance).
This paper discusses how Microsoft can help your organization achieve a successful hybrid cloud strategy and present the enabling technologies from on-premises, cross-premises, and off-premises implementation of (parts of) the services. Several typical patterns and common scenarios are illustrated throughout this paper.
In this paper, Microsoft has looked at a significant number of the new capabilities that are available within Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V, across 5 key investment areas: “Scalability, Performance & Density – We’ve shown how, with Hyper-V customers can run the biggest, most powerful virtual machines, to handle the demands of their biggest workloads. We saw that as hardware scale grows, customers wishing to take advantage of the largest physical systems to drive the highest levels of density, and reduce overall costs, can do so successfully with Hyper-V. In addition, we looked at a number of the points of integration between Hyper-V and hardware, driving the highest levels of performance for enterprise applications. Security & Multitenancy – We looked not only at the different capabilities such as BitLocker, which enables a level of physical security for the virtualized hosts, but also some of the in-box, granular networking security capabilities now built into the Hyper-V Extensible Switch, which enables customers to securely and easily isolate and control access to their key workloads inside the virtualized environment. Flexible Infrastructure – We discussed how, in a modern datacenter, customers are looking to be agile, in order to respond to changing business demands quickly, and efficiently, and how through the new innovation in Live Migration, Hyper-V provides this in the box. Being able to move workloads flexibly around the infrastructure is of incredible importance, and in addition, customers want to be able to choose where best to deploy their workloads based on the needs of that workload specifically, and to do that, Network Virtualization plays a significant part. Also, for customers with heterogeneous infrastructures, with a mixture of both Linux and Windows-based workloads, Hyper-V provides the ideal platform through the continued engineering and development to improve Linux performance on Hyper-V. High Availability & Resiliency – As customers’ confidence in virtualization grows, and they virtualize their more mission-critical workloads, the importance of keeping those workloads continuously available grows significantly. With Windows Server 2012 R2, having capabilities built into the platform that not only help keep those workloads highly available, but also, in the event of a disaster, quick to restore in another geographical location, is of immense importance when choosing a platform for today’s modern datacenter. We discussed specific improvements at both the fabric and the workload level that help to ensure that customers can keep their most mission critical applications and data as continuously available as possible. Virtualization Innovation – Finally, we discussed some of the key features that take Hyper-V beyond just virtualization. Features such as the Automatic VM Activation – a fantastic addition for Service Providers and disconnected environments where VM activation has been a challenge in days gone by. In addition, Generation 2 VMs herald a new direction for Hyper-V VMs, exposing new capabilities, for both performance, flexibility and security, now through to the virtual machines themselves. Across each of these 5 key areas, there have been a number of improvements. Building on the innovative, solid platform of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 provides customers with an enterprise-class virtualization platform, with the key features that enterprises are looking for to virtualize their mission-critical applications and workloads, but at a fraction of the cost of competing technologies.”
Successful technologists never stop learning and great technology never stops evolving. Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) offers online Microsoft training delivered by experts to help technologists continually learn, with hundreds of courses, in 11 different languages. Our mission is to help developers, knowledgeable IT professionals and advanced students learn the latest technology, build their skills, and advance their careers. MVA is free of charge, and the entire service is hosted on Microsoft Azure. Become an MVA member so that you can earn points for your learning, achieve different levels of badges and status relative to others in your country or around the world, and get certificates when you complete an entire course. Your personal dashboard helps you track your progress against your personal learning plans. MVA learning opportunities combine on-demand courses and live events:
•On-demand courses help you learn at your own pace, and when the time is right for your busy schedule.
•MVA’s exciting live events include Jump Start training and MVA Live Q&A where you can interact with experts, and a worldwide audience of learners from around the world. Our instructors and subject matter experts will answer the questions you pose in real time chat sessions so that you can apply what you learn right away.
Developers who want to learn how to build apps for the web, Windows or Windows Phone can explore our courses on App Development training, HTML5 training, C# training, and Windows Phone app development.
IT Pros who are looking to evaluate, deploy, administer, update, and manage infrastructure in their organization should checkout our online courses on Windows Server training, Windows 8 training, Microsoft Azure training, and Microsoft Virtualization.
For Microsoft CloudOSyou can follow these great Courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy site :
Microsoft Overview of Azure features, Services and comon uses
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 