Managing Applications in Multiple Public and Private Clouds

At the Microsoft Management Summit on Tuesday, 3/22/11, Brad Anderson announced a new capability in System Center 2012 called Project Codename “Concero”.

System Center 2012 cloud and datacenter management solutions empower you with a common management toolset for your private and public cloud applications and services, thus helping you confidently deliver IT as a Service for your business.

Our goal is to help you consume the full power of and deliver private and public cloud computing on your terms. System Center 2012 provides the ability for customers to create and manage their “Private Clouds” using the virtualization infrastructure provided by Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms.

 

At his keynote, Brad outlined the key tenets for the cloud, one of which is “Self-Service”. This empowers the “Application Owners” to consume the cloud capacity in an agile manner. With System Center 2012, “Concero” provides a web based and simple experience for the application owner who will be consuming cloud capacity.

We recognize that customers will be in an environment where they will be consuming cloud capacity from multiple providers. The initial release of “Concero”  will enable customers to deploy, manage and control applications and services deployed on private clouds built using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and in the public cloud offering of Windows Azure. This provides a consistent and simple user experience for service management across these clouds. 

Some key capabilities of “Concero” are

(a) Ability to access resources across multiple Virtual Machine Manager( VMM) Servers

(b) Ability to register and consume capacity from multiple Windows Azure subscriptions

(c) Deploy and manage Services and virtual machines on private clouds created within VMM 2012 and on Windows Azure

(d) Copy Service templates (and optional resources) from one VMM Server to another

(e) Copy Windows Azure configuration, package files and VHD’s from on-premises and between Windows Azure subscriptions

(f) Enable multiple users authenticated through Active Directory to access a single Windows Azure subscription

Below are some screen shots from “Concero”

 

 

The MMS session BH04 provides more information on Concero. Enjoy!!

Vijay Tewari

Principal Group Program Manager, System Center Project Codename “Concero”