Monitoring And Operating A Private Cloud

Course details

The primary audience for this course includes cloud administrators who are responsible for monitoring and protecting the cloud infrastructure. It is also intended for solution architects who are responsible for designing cloud architectures and extending existing cloud solutions. The primary audience for this course is administrators who create service requests. The secondary audience includes datacenter administrators—who are responsible for providing provisioning for applications to include configuring and deploying—application/service business owners, and administrators who implement service requests. In addition, the secondary audience includes people who need to learn the required material in order to take the Microsoft exam 70-246: Monitoring and Operating a Cloud with Microsoft System Center.

This course describes how to monitor and operate a cloud with Microsoft System Center 2012 R2. This course focuses on how to manage and administer a cloud environment, and it describes how you can monitor key infrastructure elements and applications that run within a cloud. It does not discuss planning and implementation, which is covered in 20247: Configuring and Deploying a Cloud with System Center.

At Course Completion

After completing this course students will be able to:

• Describe the Cloud Model
• Configure and optimize a private cloud
• Deploy Cloud Services
• Monitor Cloud Services
• Configure application performance monitoring in a cloud environment
• Operate and extend service management in in a cloud environment
• Automate incident creation, remediation, and change requests in a cloud environment
• Perform problem management in a cloud environment
• Automate Self-Service Provisioning in a cloud environment
• Operate a self-service multi-tenant cloud
• Cloud high availability, protection and recovery in a cloud environment
• Optimize the cloud infrastructure
• Configure SLAs, dashboards, and widgets in a cloud environment

Course Outline

Module 1: Introduction to the Cloud Model
This module explains the key business and technical requirements behind choosing a cloud model and the elements it contains. The module also shows how to use Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to monitor and operate clouds, ensuring that it is configured correctly and running in a healthy state. Finally, you will use System Center to verify cloud infrastructure for the cloud environment.Lessons

Module 2: Configuring a Private Cloud Environment
This module examines how Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 - Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) plays a pivotal role in the private cloud. The module first provides an overview of Virtual Machine Manager, and will then show how it is used to manage a virtual environment. Additionally, this module explains how to create private clouds by using Virtual Machine Manager. In the lab, you will create a private cloud and then optimize it so that is ready for production use.Lessons

Module 3: Deploying Cloud Services
This module reviews the key elements that form a service in VMM and how the service is deployed to the private cloud.Lessons

Module 4: Monitoring Cloud Based Applications

When you provide services in a cloud, performance and availability of the service must be monitored and maintained. Monitoring of the service should be proactive and should provide detailed information, including alert notifications and reports to let you know when potential issues are about to occur in the environment that the service is running in. When issues do occur, you should have the ability to automatically take action and remediate where appropriate, which helps keep the service available and provides the performance and usability that end users expect. This module shows how Operations Manager is used to monitor the services deployed in a cloud.

Module 5: Configuring Application Performance Monitoring

This module explains how to configure APM to monitor the performance and availability of a .NET application. Additionally, it discusses how Operations Manager 2012 R2 detects and reports failure of these monitors with its alerting and diagnostics tools

Module 6: Operating and Extending Service Management in the Private Cloud

This module covers the core features of Service Manager and the security model that supports it. It also covers how to map critical IT processes to Service Manager, and how to use the features of Service Manager to administer these processes. Additionally, the module describes methods to create and manage change requests, incidents, and release records.

Lessons

Module 7: Automating Incident Creation, Remediation, and Change Requests

This module describes Orchestrator, reviews the integration features that are available through the installation of the System Center Integration Packs, and explains the processes to follow in setting up automation between Operations Manager and Service Manager.

Module 8: Problem Management in the Private Cloud
This module explains how a defined set of processes can help reduce the time to resolve problems. It also reviews how incidents and problems are managed within Service Manager. Additionally, this module explains how the integration of Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Orchestrator, and System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager can provide an automated method of generating problem records in Service Manager.Lessons

Module 9: Automating Self-Service Provisioning

The process of managing public or private clouds involves many processes, activities, and functions. To provide services through a public or private cloud, you should perform many data center activities, such as provisioning the virtual machines, network, and storage. Once the service is deployed, you need to manage and maintain it, which involves a different set of processes and activities. This module introduces the Microsoft System Center 2012 Cloud Services Process Pack that delivers many of the functions and processes that are required to deliver services to a private cloud.

Additionally, this module explains how to install and configure the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack, including integrating it with other System Center 2012 R2 components.

Module 10: Operating a Self-Service, Multi-tenant Cloud with Windows Azure Pack
In this module you will learn how the Windows Azure Pack can be used to provide a self-service portal for tenants and administrators, and a multi-tenant framework for onboarding users. You will also learn how to provision web site, virtual machine and service bus clouds as well as looking at providing database services and automation.Lessons

Module 11: High Availability, Protection, and Recovery for the Cloud

This module explains how to manage a highly available cloud Infrastructure using SQL Server 2012 Always-On, Hyper-V Replica and Azure Cloud Recovery. This module also details how to use Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 - Data Protection Manager (DPM) to provide data protection for a cloud.

Module 12: Optimizing Your Cloud Infrastructure
It is important that your cloud infrastructure is managed and maintained at all times to ensure it is operating at optimum levels. To facilitate this you should ensure that the cloud infrastructure is kept current with the most recent security and application updates. Virtual Machines hosted in the cloud infrastructure should also be kept up to date. In this module you will learn how Virtual Machine Manager can be used to keep your cloud infrastructure up to date.

Module 13: Configuring SLAs, Dashboards, and Widgets
As an IT operations toolset, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 produces and collects a vast array of data. The challenge for IT organizations as a whole is to gather this information and present it in a meaningful way to the relevant stakeholders. This module explains the various available methodologies within System Center to collect, measure, and scorecard the performance and availability of the private cloud infrastructure.Lessons