Microsoft System Center 2012 is the infrastructure management suite of Microsoft. It contains all the software needed to deploy, operate, and monitor infrastructure components running either on-premises or in cloud platforms.

Obviously, Microsoft provides a good integration between System Center 2012 and Microsoft Azure. We will discuss many examples later in this book.

System Center is a cloud management platform that allows us to create and manage a private cloud. A private cloud allows non-IT staff to provision virtual machines and applications using a self-service portal and a catalog. Strong automation makes sure the requested resources are efficiently made available to the requester with no, or hardly any, involvement of the IT staff.

This book is about the hybrid cloud and not about the private cloud. So, we will not go into the details of the various components of the System Center suite or use case scenarios.

However, let's discuss what the private cloud...