Practical Cloud Knowledge: Install, Configure, and Manage - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 183

In the previous chapters, we focused on discussing theories
and principles and briefly touched on some technical aspects
with regard to performance of some parts of a cloud system.
In this chapter, we will get our hands a little more dirty, so to speak, as we delve a bit
deeper into the technical details on how to configure and manage a cloud system.
Setting Up the Cloud
For a cloud service provider, cloud environment setup can be complex and is usually a
massive undertaking performed by teams of experts with years of experience and training.
Configuring the hardware infrastructure and hypervisor as well as other support systems
can take time and patience and a detailed plan laid out by the designers and architects. This
must all be done so the end user can begin in as few steps as possible.
For an end user, setting up a cloud environment and some virtual machines (VMs) is as
easy as creating an account because after account creation, everything the user has signed
up for has already been set up. It's a no-brainer system meant for ease and speed of use in
order to increase throughput and productivity.
Creating, Importing, and Exporting Templates
and Virtual Machines
A major contributor to the success of a major IT implementation such as a cloud system is
proper and detailed configuration management. It is important that all aspects of the system,
including end user instances, are well maintained in terms of configuration. It simply will not
do when a successfully running virtual server cannot be replicated properly because when a
new instance has been provisioned, it does not have the exact same configuration as the suc-
cessful one, probably a default configuration. This adversely affects both scalability and flex-
ibility of the system to cope with changing environmental factors.
It is for this reason that virtual machines have configuration templates that can be
exported and imported for better configuration control and to serve as backup as well.
The virtual machines or templates can be moved between data centers, or availability
zones , meaning to a totally different implementation or different virtual environment.
First, you should know what a virtual machine template is because it is at the core of
cloud computing. A virtual machine template is a library resource that consists of a guest