Session: DCIM-B317
The Cloud OS is transforming IT to address new questions: Mobility, apps, big data, cloud. Provide a cloud platform regardless of the datacenter that it is deployed on (Azure, partner, on-prem). Cloud OS enables nodern business apps, empower people centric IT, unlock insights on any data, and transform the datacenter. Cloud platform includes Outlook.com, XBOX live, Bing, Office 365, MSN, Dynamics CRM online. It includes high performance storage, multi-tenant with isolation, software-defined networking, policy-based automation, and application elasticity.
Enterprises want: flexible cloud, no vendor lock-in, multi-tenant clouds, chargeback, simple, automated, tenant choice, dynamic control, integration with LOB systems, effective utilization of existing hardware assets.
Service providers want: Win more enterprise business, usage billing, extreme automation, opportunities to upsell, customized offerings, portal integration and branding.
Common requirements: Enterprise friendly, multi-tenant IaaS, usage billing, automation, maximize hardware utilization, tenant choice, offer management, portal integration.
Windows Azure Pack
In your datacenter MS is offering a tenant portal & API that layers on top of your existing infrastructure. It also adds an admin portal & API featuring automation, tenant management, hosting plans, and billing. This all sits on top of System Center + Windows Server. Delivers a customer-ready self-service to a private cloud environment.
Presenter shows a diagram that has many components including: firewall, web app proxy, WAP tenant, RD gateway, WAP admin, ADFS, VMM, SQL, DC, hyper-V hosts, and tenant workloads.
Windows Azure pack is comprised of 13 components/installers. This includes admin site, tenant site, admin auth site, tenant auth site, admin API, tenant public API, tenant API, PowerShell API, BPA, Portal & API express.
Authentication options include: out of the box, ADFS, web application proxy, Azure AD, multi-factor authentication.
At this point the presenter did several configuration demos. Those are best seen via the video, and would be hard to describe it a coherent manner otherwise.
Service Provider Foundation
- Requires four groups in the management AD instance
- Two service accounts, one in AD and one local on the SPF server
- Must have admin rights in VMM and in SQL server
Service Management Automation
- Key: Start with good use cases and layer on the complexity
- Remember that SPF must trust the SMA certificate
Summary
For those customers wishing to deploy the Windows Azure pack, this was a good session.  If you want to deploy the Azure pack, then download the session video and get some good configuration pointers. Do keep in mind the configuration is not for the faint of heart. I hope in the next version of the pack/Windows (2015?) that it will be greatly simplified.
