If you are facing a drought and you want to make it rain, all you need are a few clouds and some dry ice. But if you are creating a mini-cloud for your data center network, you need a few more ingredients.

Luckily, though, a recent blog post by Yigal Edery explains how Windows Server 8 can help you create the data center network architecture you need. Edery begins by explaining the traditional way to build a cloud, and then goes on to show how Windows Server 8 can make the process easier.

Usually, you would need four to five networks for your Hyper-V hosts, with separate NICs and networks for cluster traffic, live migration, storage access, out of band management and VM tenant workloads. Each of these would be physically separated and the number could be doubled if you wanted redundancy.

But, with Windows Server 8, you can simplify this set up considerably. Edery recommends two different possible approaches.

First, with 10GbE (as opposed to the more common 1GbE found in most data center networks today), you can compress your operation down into two networks. One would have the storage, live migration, clustering and manage traffic flows. The other would have all the VM tenant generated traffic. This would still allow you to apply QoS policies for native traffic and at the Hyper-V switch level, guaranteeing bandwidth for virtual machines.

The other approach would be to converge your entire network onto one NIC (News - Alert). This is possible because you can create additional switch ports on the Hyper-V extensible switch and route traffic through them. This is a bold new approach, and the details are still being ironed out. Still, it promises to be a set-up with a lot of potential.

In other data center network news, Dell (News - Alert) recently announced new products for the data center, including a new line of servers, storage hardware and a new network virtualization architecture framework.