The Zen of Hosting: Part 2 - 40000 Foot View
So part 1 was the reasoning and the bulk of the non-technical part in the series; this post is about the high-level view of the architecture. At its core, a hosted network is just a normal network—except that it needs to service not only one organization but multiple organizations. The biggest problem with this is that most networking technologies aren't designed for handling multiple organizations. A core strategy for VirtualBox was to use Microsoft technologies (we are a Microsoft Gold Partner, and that’s where our strongest skills lie as an organization). So let’s look at what that could mean:
- User Management: Active Directory
- Email: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
- Portal/Intranet: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
- CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Database: Microsoft SQL Server
- ERP: Microsoft Dynamics GP
This shouldn’t be a shock—it’s almost the standard shopping list for any Microsoft-based solution. But the problem is that some of these products don’t easily allow multiple organizations to use them. Let’s start with the most commonly used item on that list: Active Directory, which, in my view, is also the least able to cope with multiple organizations.
Based on what I’ve seen, most large companies that need to host multiple organizations in a single deployment tend to set up a forest and trusts, connecting multiple domains within the forest. This lets each domain be individually named and managed, provides centralized security, and prevents any domain from interfering with others. The problem is that it’s still multiple domains—meaning administrative overhead becomes very high. I’d likely need a server per domain, but I really only want one because I don’t want to deploy everything multiple times. Each service should be deployed once and used many times.
Well, Microsoft has actually solved this with an interesting solution named Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC), which is currently in version 4.0. HMC is developed by the same division behind another favorite technology of mine—Customer Care Framework (CCF). HMC shares the same forward-thinking approach as CCF: taking new or different ideas and turning them into practical solutions. The HMC solution is delivered the same way as CCF—in a guidance package.
Next time, I’ll dive into what HMC is and then we’ll revisit how it lets us take one Active Directory domain and host multiple companies within it.