Chapter 2. Getting the Cloud Fabric Ready

Fabric is one of the most important and crucial part of any traditional data center or cloud solution. Cloud fabric essentially includes, but is not limited to compute, network, storage, and hypervisors. Well designed and deployed fabric infrastructure is the way towards smooth operations of any cloud or traditional data center. In this chapter, we will cover all aspects of planning and deploying cloud fabric for our Windows Azure Pack-based cloud solution. It will help you understand fabric requirements and deployment practices for a WAP-based cloud solution. We will also include installation and configuration of major components such as SQL DB, SCVMM, SPF, and so on. We will be covering planning guidelines for both organizations' private cloud as well as for service providers' cloud. This fabric infrastructure will be used to deliver IaaS services in our WAP cloud.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Cloud fabric infrastructure planning
• Hyper-V deployment best practices
• Setting up virtual machines for cloud management fabric
• Planning and deploying SQL Server for cloud management DB
• Installing and configuring System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
• Planning and configuring cloud compute hypervisor layer with SCVMM
• Planning and configuring cloud network with SCVMM
• Planning and configuring cloud storage with SCVMM
• Planning and deploying System Center Service Provider Foundation