Creating the private cloud fabric

In VMM, before deploying VMs and services to a private cloud, you need to set up the private cloud fabric.

There are three resources that are included in the fabric in VMM 2016:

• Servers: These contain virtualization hosts (Hyper-V and VMware servers) and groups, PXE, update servers (that is, WSUS), and other servers.
• Networking: This contains the network fabric and devices configuration (for example, gateways, virtual switches, network virtualization); it presents the wiring between resource repositories, running instances, VMs, and services.
• Storage: This contains the configuration for storage connectivity and management, simplifying storage complexities, and how storage is virtualized. For example, you can configure the SMI-S and SMP providers or a Windows 2016 SMB 3.0 file server.

If you are really serious about setting up a private cloud, you should carry out a virtualization assessment using MAP, as discussed above and work on a detailed design document covering hardware, hypervisor, fabric, and management. With this in mind, the implementation will be pretty straightforward.

System Center 2016 will help you install, configure, manage, and monitor your private
cloud from the fabric to the hypervisor and up to service deployment. It can also be integrated with public cloud services( for instance, Azure Site Recovery to protect and replicate your VMs to Azure public cloud).