What is the University Private Cloud?

Building upon the foundation provided by the USDC, Shared Infrastructure Services offer a private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud to the University. This automated self-service virtual infrastructure is available to host services and applications for departments, colleges, divisions and researchers.

The cloud provides virtual machines that can be used to run a wide variety of applications and services including:
  • File servers
  • Print servers
  • Web sites
  • Development servers
  • Test servers
  • Windows domain controllers

Why use the University Private Cloud?

The cloud provides:

  • A robust enterprise grade platform - built upon VMware vSphere technology, with resilience built in at all layers of the stack.
  • An elastic platform - scale up and down at will.
  • Dual-site, replicated storage - data is protected in the event of failure, with the service delivered from two sites (South Parks Road and Banbury Road) and DR failover between two.
  • Access to local campus VLANs, allowing hosted machines to appear on a departmental or college network.
  • Access to the resilient data centre network for critical services
  • Self service and remote access facilities

How to make use of the Private Cloud

The private cloud offers two different services. It provides the option to either rent a single virtual machine or a collection of resources out of which multiple machines can be provisioned (known as a virtual Data Center [vDC]).

These options are explained in detail, along with possible network configurations and how to start making use of the private cloud on our Services page.

Further Information

You can read more about the private cloud services, the charges, and access the howto guides using the links below:

For more information please see the Private Cloud information sheet.

If you have any specific questions regarding the service then please email sis@oucs.ox.ac.uk.