Announcing the "Hybrid Cloud - with NVGRE (WS SC 2012 R2)" white paper

Announcing the NVGRE white paper

Ever since WS 2012 was in preview, the Hyper-V fans have been celebrating the opportunities for network virtualization.

First in VMM 2012 SP1 Beta, we saw there were two options to manage and implement network virtualization. IP-rewrite and NVGRE. Now, NVGRE is the standard that is implemented with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager.

However, the hybrid cloud story wasn’t complete. A critical component was missing to make the scenario production ready.

As Microsoft announced during TechEd this year, we will have a native virtualization gateway shipped together with Windows Server 2012 R2. The entire network virtualization can be implemented and managed by Virtual Machine Manager in System Center 2012 R2.

This did indeed increase the interest around network virtualization with technology from Microsoft, with no need for third party solutions to fulfill the story. Many users from around the world have been asking questions in the forums related to network virtualization in the past, and especially about virtualization gateway since this is available in Windows Server 2012 R2. To address this to the community, we decided to write a white paper that should be helpful for real world implementations.

Together with some fellow MVP’s, Flemming Riis and Stanislav Zhelyazkov, we started to deploy a new datacenter with the R2 preview bits in order to fulfill the Hybrid Cloud story.

We have not only deployed the solution, but we have also been breaking it apart to detect dependencies, eventual bugs, and concerns related to real world scenarios.

We are looking forward to finish the document in a couple of days, and we hope you will find it useful.