Today – during the announcement of System Center 2012 RC availability) – seems the perfect occasion to announce our book called Microsoft Private Cloud Computing. Mid-2011 four MVP’s decided to make a joint effort at writing a practical book on deploying a Microsoft Private Cloud. The four authors are:

 

Aidan writes the introductory chapters on Private Cloud, Hans deals with the Fabric Management (Servers, Storage, Network), Patrick explains the Service Management (VMM Library, Service Modeling) and Damian focuses on Private Cloud Solutions (VMM Services, Self-Service, App Controller).

Kristian Nese (@kristiannese) who is also MVP System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management accepted the role of technical reviewer. Kristian has also written a book on Cloud Computing in Norwegian.

If you are dealing with the Fabric part you need lots and lots of hardware. Fortunately one of our great customers at INOVATIV as well as my personal friends from XS4ALL (Joey Hofstede, Alexander Rijnbeek) have helped us tremendously. They offered us a remotely accessible lab including HP Blade Servers, HP EVA storage and lots of capacity to test all new VMM 2012 functionality. XS4ALL is a key Dutch Internet Provider, so you can imagine the download speeds if I ever wanted to grab a few ISO’s.

We are still busy writing our final chapters and will soon be starting with the editing process. The release of Microsoft Private Cloud Computing is expected just a few weeks after Microsoft Management Summit (MMS12), in May 2012.

So far writing my first book has been an amazing experience. Very little spare time and hardly any time for tweeting and blogging (which is disastrous for my Klout and PeerIndex rankings).

Before this, I had the pleasure to be the technical editor to Aidan Finn’s successful Mastering Hyper-V Deployment book.

There is a provisional book cover and although currently only Aidan Finn is mentioned, there are three other authors who contribute to the book. Not to worry, that will change some day.

The book can be pre-ordered from here

Related: http://www.microsoft.com/business/events/en-us/PrivateCloudExec/#fbid=IqJgx-M_szS

Here are the announcement blogs of my fellow authors:

Aidan: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=12024
Damian: http://www.damianflynn.com/2012/01/17/microsoft-private-cloud-computing-book/