Designing a Private Cloud Infrastructure

Before you start designing cloud infrastructure, or even selecting the products you want to use to implement it, you MUST know what services you want to offer, who your customers are, and what workloads you’re expecting.

Start the design process closest to the workload: compute and storage elements. You’ll also have to decide whether to use traditional storage arrays or a distributed storage solution.

The network services elements you’ll use in you cloud depend on the services your cloud has to offer, and the amount of self-service you want to offer to your customers.

You could decide to use physical or virtual appliances, and deploy shared or per-tenant appliances.

As the last steps in your design process you’ll have to select the virtual networking architecture you want to use, and finally design the physical network infrastructure.

Whenever you’re building a new data center, or doing a major refresh of an existing one, you should try to optimize the infrastructure and minizime the number of components you use.

You’ll find step-by-step description of that process in this section.