The Microsoft Private Cloud – A technology overview (by David Chappell)

A very interesting and enlightening article by David Chappell about IaaS (aka private cloud):

“[…] there's a clear definition of "private cloud" that pretty much all analysts and vendors in this space agree on. It's not the same thing as ordinary virtualization, nor is it legitimate to start calling your datacenter a private cloud without making any changes. Instead, the core of a private cloud is IaaS--VMs on demand--along with perhaps other services, such as deploying applications. […] To help clarify at least part of this story, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper describing the private cloud technology embedded in System Center 2012.”

“Every organization wants to use its resources well. One way to do this is by running applications in virtual machines (VMs) rather than directly on physical machines. Virtualization has real value, and most organizations have adopted this approach in their datacenters. Useful as it is, however, the next step in the evolution of virtualization has become clear: It’s private clouds.
A private cloud provides a more effective way to deploy, use, and manage VMs, applications, and other IT resources on hardware that’s dedicated to a single organization. Microsoft’s private cloud technologies, embodied in System Center 2012 and Hyper-V, make this possible.”

You can read the full white paper here [https://www.davidchappell.com/writing/white_papers/The_Microsoft_Private_Cloud_v1.0--Chappell.pdf]