Windows Azure Pack (WAP) brings the ability to run Azure services inside your own environment. You can run it elaborately on your datacenter as a private or hosted cloud or in a test lab or simply on bunch of hyper-v host machines. There is an express installation that can be installed on a single VM as well, just for the kicks.

So what is WAP really ?

Windows Azure Pack's main entry point is the portal or 'Control Panel' - a better known term in hosting industry.

Windows Azure Pack Portal brings together plethora of services and products to provide a single place to provision and manage resources for an enterprise or a hosting provider.

There are two portals, one for Administrators to setup various services, plans and manage users - aptly called as Admin portal. Another Tenant portal for end users, where users can sign-up for services and self-manage their resources such as a Virtual Machine or databases and what not.

Admin Portal (a.k.a control panel):

Tenant Portal Available Services:

Tenant Portal - Create New view:

Services that are available out of the box with WAP:

1. Virtual Machines (via System Center VMM integration)
2. Websites (distributed, multi-tenant, highly available web hosting service)
3. Database (via SQL Server and My SQL)
4. Automation (via System Center Runbooks)

What is interesting about WAP Portal is, like never before you now have brought different Microsoft products under one single umbrella both for the IT Administrators and consumers such as development teams.

While this is not what Windows Azure Pack is mainly advertised for, this makes life so much simpler for administrators and consumers alike.

Take for example, the traditional way to get a database server and a web server, you send requests to IT department, goes through approval process, procurement, allocation, management, windows updates yada yada yada. With Windows Azure Pack, all these types of assets can be provisioned, managed and monitored in one central place.

Windows Azure Pack Portal serves as the single place where the following Microsoft products come together:

1. System Center VMM, Hyper-V
2. IIS web Server (yes it does)
3. SQL Server
4. Azure Service Bus

In addition to these Microsoft products getting delivered via the portal, WAP Portal is also highly extensible for 3rd party services and products to integrate with. The out of the box My SQL database as a service is one example. Cloud Cruiser billing platform integration is another example of 3rd party service. If you are a hosting service provider you can differentiate quickly by integrating your services with WAP or vice versa with Custom Resource Provider extensions.

Windows Azure Pack shows lots of promises to change the enterprise on-premise cloud landscape. The way IT administrators had to work with disparate  products across the organization can now be simplified for the betterment of all, resources can now be converged and managed through one single web based portal like never before. Combining that with the power of new Azure originated services like Service Bus/Message Queues made available on-premise, enables more enterprise scenarios take advantage of cloud scale and flexibility inside their perimeter. Its time has come! Well, may be not that dramatically, but it definitely is looking cool, specifically for managing Microsoft technology stack and setting up an internal cloud infrastructure.

Register here to speak with our experts and see Cloud Assert Windows Azure Pack solution in action.