System centre 2012 SP1 With the official naming of Windows Server �8� as Windows Server 2012 and the launch of System Center 2012 at MMS a few weeks back, Microsoft has now delivered a solution to our customers for building their private clouds and to hosters for building their own Infrastructure-as-a-Service public cloud offerings. It is instructive to recap the meaning of moving to the cloud model and the core tenets of a cloud as was laid out in the keynote by Brad Anderson at MMS, and then take a look at how this is done with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. The Cloud Model First off, it is important to note that cloud computing does not necessarily mean that the workload is running outside a customer�s premises. The workloads could be deployed on infrastructure that is on a customer�s premises, or on their partners� premises but completely controlled and managed by the customer. That is a �private� cloud. Workloads could also be deployed and run on a hoster�s premi...