Windows Azure Pack is a Microsoft solution which integrates with Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center Suite, SQL, and IIS Servers. Together, these provide an enterprise class cloud solution for both organizations and service providers. Windows Azure Pack brings the capabilities of Microsoft Public Cloud, that is, Microsoft Azure's capabilities to your data center.
Windows Azure Pack consists of a collection of Azure technologies which enables organizations to have enterprise class self-service and multitenant cloud along with consistent Microsoft Azure Public Cloud experience. Eliminating the confusion, Windows Azure Pack runs independently with Microsoft Azure Cloud, and is deployed in your own organization's data center; managed and operated by your organization only.
Windows Azure Pack provides cloud service offerings including virtual machines (Infrastructure as a Service), Database as a Service (DBaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and many more along with custom offering enabled architecture which gives flexibility to provide anything as a service (XaaS).
Windows Azure Pack can primarily be used in the following use cases:
By an organization as a private cloud solution
By a cloud service provider, that is, cloud reseller, as a Hosted Cloud Platform
Amazingly, Windows Azure Pack is available at no extra cost for Microsoft customers.
Note
Licensing for other Microsoft components like Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, and so on has to be considered for cloud management and workload infrastructure.
In today's era of cloud computing, IT departments of organizations are turning into IT service providers for their different teams and LOBs. In traditional computing models, different teams approach their IT departments for their IT needs, which becomes quite a lengthy process involving several levels of approvals, procurement of HW/SW, implementations, services, schedules, and much more. In this model, infrastructure readiness itself takes considerable amount of time and resources, resulting in various constraints when it comes to application deployment. The situation gets even worse when it comes to test and development environment-related requests.
A private cloud helps in eliminating these challenges drastically. For example, with a private cloud solution a development team can request for a VM with required specification and middleware components using an easy to use self-service portal without getting into manual e-mail threads with IT infra provider departments. In such a private cloud infrastructure, a development team can expect to have a server ready for applications usage in a matter of minutes, whereas in a traditional model it could have taken days.
Windows Azure Pack is the platform that can help the organization in getting all those private cloud benefits and capabilities in a very efficient manner. Let's have a look at few of the major requirements and characteristics of any private cloud and their solutions using Azure Pack:
Familiar technologies and operational simplicity: One of the important aspects of any private cloud solution is that the solution has to be managed by the organization's IT personnel only. Technology should be familiar and easily manageable. Windows Azure Pack integrates with Microsoft products such as Windows Servers, System Center, SQL, IIS, and so on, which are already being used across the world by organizations for their IT needs.
Self service portal and automated provisioning: Windows Azure Pack provides the same tenant portal for self-service which is being used by customers of Microsoft's public cloud along with automated provisioning using SPF, SMA, and SCVMM. These roles will be covered in upcoming topics.
Effective utilization of existing infrastructure: Windows Azure Pack can leverage existing infrastructure to provision workload, along with effective utilization using proven Hyper-V and SCVMM capabilities such as dynamic memory, dynamic optimization, differencing disks, and many more.
Support for software defined infrastructure technologies: Windows Azure Pack can leverage software-defined infrastructure components such as SDN and SDS. This can significantly help in being hardware agnostic and avoiding proprietary expensive hardware purchases. An example includes using a SDS product with commodity hardware servers and disk enclosures instead of enterprise class storage array.
Dynamic control and chargeback: Different teams and line of businesses have different IT needs; for example, an HR department may need more storage to store data whereas Finance may need more computing power along with storage. Built-in Windows Azure Pack plans and usage services can be leveraged to have better control over different business resources usage along with chargeback for financial management.
Support of multi-vendor operating systems and applications: As Windows Azure Pack cloud is integrated with Hyper-V and System Center, it supports a wide range of operating systems comprising various Windows and Linux flavors, virtualization vendors (Hyper-V by default, VMware by partner provided solutions), and application/database products.
Custom cloud services: Every organization may have some specific custom needs limited only to a particular entity or team. Windows Azure Pack customer offering gives organizations flexibility to design and develop their custom services and integrate them with Windows Azure Pack for cloud enablement.
Note
All features or self-service capabilities may not be available while using VMware as a hypervisor. This will be covered in detail in Chapter 10, Extend Windows Azure Pack Capabilities with Partner Solutions.
Windows Azure Pack gives the flexibility to cloud service providers (such as resellers/hosting service providers) to provide Microsoft Azure Cloud a consistent experience as well as capabilities to their customers. In this scenario, Windows Azure Pack components run in a service provider's data center and provide services to external or internal customers.
Windows Azure Pack provides service providers the ability to build their own cloud to host services at a lower cost and with proven Azure technologies, enabling them to win more and more business. This brings a win-win situation for cloud providers as well as for Microsoft as the Microsoft Azure technology footprint is expanding in cloud markets beyond Azure data centers.
A cloud service provider's main focus is to provide a true multitenant, self-service cloud along with extreme automation possibilities, which differs from organizational private cloud needs which we discussed earlier. Let's have a look at some major requirements of a service provider's cloud solutions and their fulfillment using Windows Azure Pack:
To win more and more cloud business: This is not a direct technical requirement from a cloud solution, but one of the most important aspects of any service provider's business. The service provider needs to win the customer's confidence to get their workload running in the provider's cloud. Windows Azure Pack is built using the same technologies that power one of the leading public clouds, Microsoft Azure, to serve customers worldwide. This will help service providers to offer proven technologies to their customers at a lower cost, enabling more and more business.
True multitenant offerings: The cloud service provider will have to serve varying needs of different customers. True multitenant architecture with respect to portal, offerings, QoS (Quality of Service), and so on is must for any provider's cloud platform. Windows Azure Pack enables these features with tenant portals, Windows Azure Pack plans and subscriptions, and so on.
Networking isolation and extension capabilities: A customer's workload running in same data center will have different networks, security needs and requirements to be completely isolated from each other. Windows Azure Pack's virtual network, using network virtualization, provides complete isolation of networks for a customer's workloads. Windows Azure Pack's site to site VPN capabilities, using network virtualization gateways, enables customers to extend their on-premises network to a service provider's cloud network for hybrid scenarios.
Wide range of cloud offerings (IaaS, PaaS, and so on): Windows Azure Pack cloud solution supports a wide range of in-built self-service IaaS, PaaS, and DBaaS offerings along with capabilities to add custom service offerings.
Usage and billing: Windows Azure Pack cloud solution has usage and metering capabilities which can be used along with SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) chargeback or other third party usage and billing solutions like Cloud Assert and others to provide an enterprise class cloud billing solution.
Extreme automation possibilities: With Service Management Automation (SMA) integration with Windows Azure Pack, service providers can have their own automation workflows (written in PowerShell workflows) exclusively written for their environments, enabling a completely automated cloud solution. Along with SMA, standard Microsoft automation solutions such as System Center Orchestrator and Windows PowerShell can be leveraged to automate operations.
Optimized resource usage: Windows Azure Pack cloud solution leverages proven enterprise class Hyper-V Virtualization technologies which enables maximum usage of hardware and software resources.
Custom offerings: Windows Azure Pack provides the option to add custom offerings integrated with its portal, which enables service providers to add custom unique offerings apart from default offerings.