Private Cloud IT Camps
I have covered some of what we do at IT camps in a couple of previous posts, but what we did in Birmingham and London this week was to launch a new kind of camp, on Private Cloud. This builds on knowledge gained at a Hyper-V IT camp and on Microsoft Virtual Academy and explain the how and why of managing virtualisation at scale in your data centre..
Virtualisation at scale obviously means that you are working in a larger organisation, and the concepts of a private cloud such as charge back, scalability and self service are really only appropriate to those business with lots of physical servers, a departmental structure and a group of dedicated IT professionals (although these might be outsourced).
System Center 2012 is designed to make the private cloud work and that’s what we show in this camp. However the individual components in the suite can also be used to proactively manage servers and applications in organisations that only have tens of virtual machines rather than hundreds. So some of what we talk about at a private camp is relevant to the IT Professional in a smaller business but the main thrust of the camp is Private Cloud. Please bear this in mind when registering to come along.
I also realise that the the term private cloud is not popular with IT Professionals because it is either seen as marketing spin or its all about reducing costs and IT jobs. I disagree this stuff is important because
a. The standardisation and automation that the private cloud brings to a data centre frees you up from fire fighting and lets you concentrate on the projects the business want to implement as the business changes.
Tools like System Center track what is being done to your data centre be that in response to fixes or requests for change, so you don’t have to. For example if a new virtual machine is deployed it will show up as an asset you will know what operating system and applications are on it who owns it and how long it is needed for
Both of which go to make the IT department look more like a service and less like and overhead. On an individual level you will have more respect from the business and that can be more important than a pay rise in my opinion.
Back to the camps we are running just one more thing; if you are coming to our camps on Hyper-V and you are already running Hyper-V in production then we may well be covering the basics you are already aware of. However because Hyper-V has its place in the smallest of businesses, then this camp is a great introduction for an IT Professional in any organisation, and we know this because we have had some really good feedback from running these camps.