Recently I was asked few times what is the difference between virtualization and private cloud. There are distinct differences between virtualization and private cloud. They are not the same thing. Virtualization is just the first step towards private cloud. According to NIST defination, a private or public cloud should have following characteristics. These are the fundamental differences between private cloud and virtualization.
On-demand self-service: the ability for a user to obtain computing resources (compute, network, storage) as needed and automatically, without interaction with other people Broad network access: the computing resources are accessible over the network and using tools widely used as thin clients and thick clients (phones, laptops, desktops, slate) Resource pooling: the computing resources are pooled together to serve different customers using a multi-tenant model. The different physical and virtual resources are assigned dynamically, based on the needs of users. This allows you to get a sense of independence from the location of resources as the end user does not have an exact idea of ??where you actually reside the resources it uses, but may indicate a high level of preferential locations Rapid elasticity: the resources can be quickly modified, often automatically, so you can quickly adapt to the waxing and waning of necessity. From an end user’s point of view, this can lead to the feeling of having unlimited resources to buy the necessary amount for the time. Measured Service: The cloud systems automatically monitor and optimize resources by exploiting the capabilities measure implemented at different levels of abstraction depending on the type of service provided. The use of resources can be controlled, measured and reported enabling the end user and service provider access to information transparently use Virtualization alone does not achieve these characteristics and does not enable efficiency. Let’s look how these cloud functionalities can be through Microsoft technologies. Base Virtualization Infrastructure The base infrastructure for private cloud is virtualization. One important thing everyone tends to take for granted is Active Directory. Active Directory provides the base for identify and security management. In the base infrastructure, there are
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