Datacenter abstraction layer - my favorite story

After the announcements during North America’s version of TechEd, I was finally able to discuss datacenter abstraction layer with my customers, and explain how we are doing things in R2 of Virtual Machine Manager (System Center 2012 R2).

Let me take a few steps back and explain.

I work as a CTO at Lumagate and is also so honored to be one of the special MVP’s in the cloud and management space. My bread and butter is cloud computing, and I spend most of my time on tuning and playing with datacenter technologies like Hyper-V, Azure and Virtual Machine Manager.

Over the last years, I have visited hundreds of VMware customers and evangelized the hypervisor in Windows Server. My job got much easier with the release of Windows Server 2012 and SP1 for System Center 2012, and now it is about to become easier once again, with the upcoming R2 release of both products.

What do I mean with that?

I could always visit those customers again and show new features, talk a bit more about the Cloud OS and hybrid magic, but I am having better approach this time.

Datacenter abstraction layer (dal) is my friend, and VMM is the component I use to put everything into the context.

Instead of having the traditional comparison of hypervisors where we (eventually) always ends up discussing features, I am focusing on the bigger picture. The complete picture with every required datacenter component involved.

Hypervisors is nothing without networking and storage. If you have been working with Virtual Machine Manager in SP1, you must have ran into the networking discussions about software defined networking, logical switches, logical networks and so on. In other words, you better know what you are talking about and know the details of the OSI-model. The same applies for storage. Customers expect that you are familiar with storage technologies and capabilities, no matter what manufacturer they are using.

To be able to manage all of this from a single pane of glass, we need abstraction and integration.

This is where Microsoft is best and brightest.

Instead of having a similar approach as the others (competitors) where they buy some companies and creates 1:1 plug-ins, Microsoft is using standard based management that simplifies our life.

What to expect from System Center 2012 R2:

Standard-based management that delivers datacenter plug-n-play.

We have already seen the silhouette’s and shadows from this already in 2012 and 2012 SP1, where you can do cool stuff with your hardware through BMC protocols, SMI-S, SMP plus more, and more is about to come. No matter what network device or storage you are buying, you should just be able to plug it into your datacenter and use it with System Center. This is datacenter abstraction layer!

Microsoft is doing this on high volume components that will decrease the cost of them.

By having this approach, we can shift from planning and deploying to integrating systems to have more capacity and capability in our clouds.

Looking forward to a busy second half of this year, ready to demonstrate, deploy, sell and help customers around the globe with datacenter abstraction layer delivered by the Cloud OS.

My next blog post will be much more technical where we take a closer look on the actual technologies involved through WS-Man, WinRM and Powershell.