Can someone please explain it to me what the difference between Hyper-V private cloud and Failover cluster of VMs in Hyper-V is.
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In Microsoft-land a Private Cloud is a set of hardware running Hyper-V, ESXi, or Xen that are managed by SCVMM. It's rare to see Xen or ESXi in a SCVMM cloud, but it is supported to an extent. Fabrics and Clouds are defined in SCVMM to automate scaling and deployment with automatic host, storage, and network configuration. Server App-V is used to rapidly deploy new application instances on templates. Application Templates are used to define all of the tiers in an application (database/middle/web/etc) and upgrade/update each tier in a way that the application is still available to users. Clouds are typically deployed on top of Hyper-V Failover Clusters, but this is not a requirement. They also typically leverage other System Center products like Orchestrator and Ops Manager to scale and remediate issues automatically.
A Hyper-V Failover Cluster is just a set of clustered Hyper-V hosts that can share Cluster Shared Volumes for highly available VMs in the event of a hardware failure. A Hyper-V Failover Cluster is a building block that is almost always used to build a Microsoft Private Cloud on, but it is not a cloud in an of itself (at least by Microsoft's definition).
Keep in mind that "cloud" is not a technical term. It's a marketing term that technology companies have abstracted. It basically just means that you have an infrastructure that isn't dependent on and particular hardware, and is able to scale on demand. It can mean whatever the marketing department wants it to mean this quarter.
MDMarra
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Management. A cloud is a hthing without substance - you do not care where the VM is, that is handled by the cloud management software. If you do failover that is a LOT of stuff to set up by hand.
The rest is marketing blahblah - at the end a cloud is the concept of a dynamic allocation of VM's while the other element (failover cluster) is the technical implementation.
