Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure

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Numerous enterprise data centers have less than a few thousand servers (in bare-metal or VM format). These data centers could use high-density compute, storage and networking components to build a corresponding private cloud that would fit in just a few racks… and yet many of them use outdated technologies and design approaches in their private cloud planning and rollouts.

This vendor-agnostic webinar describes the infrastructure requirements of small- and medium-sized private clouds and presents an architectural blueprint that could be used to design simple-to-operate private clouds.

Want to know more?

This webinar covers high-level design decisions and various design options. You'll find in-depth descriptions of technologies mentioned in this webinar in the following webinars:

• Data Centers for Networking Engineers
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Deep Dive
• Data Center Fabric Architectures
• Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics
• Overlay Virtual Networking
• Network Function Virtualization
• Virtual Firewalls
• vSphere 6 Networking Deep Dive
• VXLAN Technical Deep Dive

Contents

High-Level Decisions

This section focuses on high-level decisions that have to be made before the decision to build a private cloud is reached: defining the customers, the services and the extent of the self-service capabilities.

Technical Guidelines

Covers the high-level technical guidelines one should keep in mind when designing a new private cloud infrastructure: from the focus on standardization and automation to ruthless conservatism and simplicity.

Collecting the Requirements

This section describes the requirements you have to collect before you start the infrastructure design.

Compute Resources

Modern high-density servers pack tens of cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and multiple 10GE uplinks in a single 1RU package. This section describes how you can benefit from the advances in server architectures and how you can meet legacy hypervisor design guidelines (example: 6 uplinks) in 10GE environment.

Selecting the Storage Solution

Storage technologies used to be easy – you had to select the target storage capacity, IOPS and SAN bandwidth. Modern storage solutions range from storage arrays with SSD caches to distributed files systems (VMware VSAN, Nutanix …).

This section describes generic storage selection guidelines: LUN sharing or file system access? Storage arrays or distributed storage? FC, iSCSI or NFS?

Network Services Implementation

Network services were traditionally implemented with physical appliances, but the advances in x86 server performance and appliance software made virtual appliances an affordable alternative that allows you to implement flexible highly available designs that were simply impossible to achieve with hardware appliances.

Network Virtualization Technology

VLANs or overlay networks? There’s no right answer – it all depends on your choice of network services implementation, required network stability, size of the data center network and expected number of tenants.

Network Infrastructure

You can start designing the network infrastructure only after you know the required bandwidth and the expected traffic mix. It makes sense to start the network design phase only after the servers, storage and network services appliances have already been selected.

This section starts with a simple 2-switch design and slowly grows it into a full-blown data center network.

Target Audience

Network architects and designers planning and designing private clouds with less than a few thousand virtual servers.

You should have moderate understanding of data center technologies (including storage technologies like FC/FCoE if applicable in your environment) to get the most benefit from this webinar’s design discussions and guidelines. For a recommended list of prerequisite webinars see the Prerequisites tab.

Prerequisites

Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure webinar relies on concepts and technologies explained in numerous other webinars, including:

• Data Center 3.0 for Networking Engineers (particularly the storage section);
• Data Center Fabric Architectures
• Cloud Computing Networking
• Overlay Virtual Networks
• Virtual Firewalls

You can get access to all these webinars with the Cloud Computing webinar bundle or yearly subscription.

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