New-Datacenter?

Note: This post is to facilitate conversation on the topic of making a new Windows datacenter. This is far from a howto. If you came here looking for that, you will be disappointed.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then there was the command line.

But more seriously, I've been playing around with the idea of bootstrapping a Windows data center. Assume you have up to some hypervisor. Since we're making a Windows ecosystem, we can assume VMware products. How do you go from "a few ESXi hypervisors" to "a fully-capable Windows datacenter", complete with all the services you expect from Microsoft?

The Dream

A one-touch solution to deploy an entire Windows datacenter.

The Way Forward

The immediate answer is automation. Powershell automation, specifically. But where does the Powershell magic run from? Can't run on the bare hypervisors. Okay, so we'll need a bootstrapping Powershell.... server (a BPS?), of sorts. So assume we have a few hypervisors and a single Windows host (not on the hypervisor since that hasn't been configured yet). 

We'll also need some binaries. So assume all binaries are also on this BPS. Let's also throw some templates in there, just to get a vCenter started up. This is getting long... for the sake of brevity, let's just say we have a set of distinct scripts that, on their own, will give us all the components we need for our Windows datacenter.

How do we tie them all together?

Devil, something something, Details

This is a bootstrapped environment, so we don't have the luxuries of Active Directory or DFS or anything else that makes life easier. We have a bunch of blank Windows installations. First challenge - we have to get the binaries & scripts to the blank VMs. We could set up a share on our BPS, but our blank VMs don't know how to get to it, and we can't even use a Workflow from our BPS because, with no server certs, WinRM will only use the 'default' configuration, which limits you to a single hop for cred-forwarding.

The only thing I've come up with is to set up a minimal IIS installation and have the blank VMs download the necessary files over HTTP. We can use some simpler 3rd party web servers, but then we'd be introducing non-native products, which only complicates things.

Assuming we can transfer the data (binaries) and the instructions(scripts) to the blank VMs, how do we choreograph the installation of the products that make up our datacenter? I'm imagining something like a Master Powershell Workflow run from the BPS that knows the order of operations. 

This is getting complicated. And I'm concerned that it's unnecessarily so.

Externalize Away the Setbacks

And all of this is to say nothing about sustainment. You can create a bunch of stuff. Nice. Now how about configuration management? I don't know either. Maybe this has all been done before and I'm just not aware of it. Sounds like more research...