When Does a Virtualized Data Center Become a Private Cloud?

Everyone agrees that server virtualization is an enabling technology for the cloud, but how do organizations that have adopted virtualization in their data centers transition to a private cloud (i.e., a cloud built from infrastructure assets owned by the organization)? By first taking a look at the public cloud and how it delivers resources, we can differentiate the virtualized data center from a private cloud.

The first defining feature of the public cloud is transactional access to resources – meaning that users can access resources on-demand through a self-service user interface in a utility style, pay-for-what-you-use model. In the private cloud, this capability is incredibly transformative to the run-of-the-mill virtualized data center where IT managers still have to mete out and manage resources in such a way that cannot optimize time or the resources used.

The second defining feature of the public cloud is that it abstracts resources from the user.  This feature is of course powered by virtualization and leads to a number of cloud-associated benefits such as the ability to access or provision resources in real time in an elastic manner, as well as the ability to scale up or scale down resource use depending on user demand.  Importantly, from an IT perspective, there is also a clear separation from the infrastructure or service requested by the end user and the way in which it is delivered. Masking the underlying IT complexity from the end user gives the IT organization degrees of freedom in how they manage and deliver IT services.

A virtualized data center is able to abstract resources to an extent, but it often does not pool them for transactional access. The question then is, how do organizations gain that functionality? To answer that, we have to address what is missing in the virtualized data center: a management layer which not only pools resources, but enables management of those resources and management of users from a single pane of glass.

Virtual management solutions come in many different stripes. You have your VM monitoring tools, and your VM security tools, your DR tools, and so on. But to fill this gap around private cloud management, there is one specific category of solutions – called virtual lab management – that is already delivering the core capabilities required, While originally developed for development, testing and other preproduction environments, these management and self-service systems often have broader VM and application lifecycle management capabilities which can enable private cloud infrastructure.