Part 1: A network in the Sky - The dream
Part 2: A network in the Sky - Coming soon

This ​series of posts is aimed at looking at the posibilities, pro's, con's and costs of running your entire network (or small portions of it) in the cloud.

There is a lot of talk about moving to The Cloud around at the moment, but just how far can we push it?

At the moment I have a whapping big HyperV server that runs under my desk with dual Xenon processors, 76GB RAM and a couple of Terabytes worth of storage on a RAID disk.  Pretty hefty stuff, then they it does have to run the following VMs:

  • Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), DHCP Server, DNS Server
  • ForeFront TMG
  • SQL Server (yes, it's virtual!)
  • SharePoint 2010 Dev Farm (s)
  • SharePoint 2010 Shared Services Farm
  • SharePoint 2010 Demo Farm
  • SharePoint 2013 Demo Farm
  • SharePoint 2013 Dev Farm
  • Active Directory Federation Serices 2.0 (ADFS2.0)
  • Network Services: TFTP, DirSync, etc
  • Retired TFS Server (which is now on http://tfs.visualstudio.com)
As you can see, it's quite weight to put onto the machines shoulders.  Fortunately for me and my small development team it works like a dream, but it's pretty noisy, I can't log into Office 365 when my internet connection is down, etc and I am looking for a better way. The ultimate aim is to move as much off-site as possible into Windows Azure and keep my house nice and light-weight, save some electricity costs (or move those costs to Cloud costs) drop the noise and be a lot more accessible than I currently am. I don't forsee everything going into The Cloud just yet, I may maintain an on-premise AD, DNS server and I will need my ForeFront TMG server for a while.  I also think that moving my SharePoint Farms and SQL Server into Azure will just be far too expensive to run compared to the office-based server, but we can explore that later on in the series.