Understanding Hosting Plans, VMM clouds and multi-tenancy - Part One

This is the first post in a series of blog posts related to Hosting Plans in Azure Pack and how things are mapped towards VMM management servers, VMM clouds in the context of multi-tenancy.

To show you an overview, have a look at the following figure:

In this case, we are dealing with a single management stamp (VMM management server) that contains several scale units, a VMM cloud and is presented to the service management API through Service Provider Foundation.

Note that we are not referring to any specific Active Directory Domain here, nor specific subnets.

This is basically a high-level overview of the dependencies you see when dealing with a hosting plan in Azure Pack to deliver VM Clouds.

Explanation

The picture contains everything you are able to present to a VMM cloud, which is basically the foundation of any hosting plan that is offering VM clouds.

In VMM, we can create host groups containing our virtualization hosts. These host groups contains several settings, policies and configuration items based on your input. In the example above we have designed the host group structure to reflect our physical locations, Copenhagen and Oslo – under the default “All hosts” group in VMM.

Further, we have added some logical networks that are present to these hosts, so we can assume we are using SMB, clustering, live migration, management, PA network (NVGRE) and front-end for all of the involved Hyper-V nodes and clusters we are managing.

Since we will be using NVGRE with WAP, only the PA network is added as a logical network to the VMM cloud. This will be covered in details in a later blog post.

We have also some port classifications which is an abstraction of the virtual port profiles, so that we can present those to a cloud and classify the VM NICs for a desired configuration.

Storage classification is used in a similar way so that the storage we add to the cloud is the only storage that should be used for our VHDs, matching the HW profiles of the VM templates. The host groups added need to be associated with these classifications.

To present the library resources in the tenant portal for VM deployments etc, we must add at least one read-only library share that can contains vhds, templates, profiles, scripts and more. If using VM roles in WAP, resource extensions is located in this library too.

The VMM Cloud abstracts the fabric resources, add read-only library shares and specifies the capacity of this cloud that defines the available amount of resources to consume through plans in WAP.

Service Provider Foundation is a multi-tenant REST Odata API for System Center that enables IaaS, and is the endpoint that connects the Service Management API in Azure Pack to your VMM management server(s) and VMM clouds.

Have a look at the figure as I will use this as a reference, as well as covering the details in the upcoming blog posts as well.