Following a Microsoft presentation about its growing MicrosoftPrivateCloud, we're now starting to see companies announce their foray into the business and follow suit.

On the NetApp community blog, Rob Briggs, a VDI Reference Architect within the NetApp Microsoft Technology Group announced the release of FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud, the first private cloud Fast Track 2.0 Validated Design. Using both NetApp and Cisco, the new software is available for developers and businesses with the newfound collaboration of multiple companies, realizing something that used to be impossible.

Mike Truitt and Bryon Surace from Microsoft discussed the Track Session a few months ago, along with the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 2.0 Validated Design. This allows companies to build on top of that technology and be sure their designs will work in the real world, in situations with high demands and high scalability.

The new FlexPod has been validated to work with both Microsoft and Citrix solutions, on their XenDesktop software, in order to increase the efficiency of this and other solutions running on top of this latest technology. With the addition of this private cloud technology, software built on this platform can be brought into the 21th century and integrate with on-premise systems along with cloud solutions.

The FlexPod architecture has been reorganized to support both Microsoft System Center 2012 and Citrix XenDesktop 5.6, along with the cloud solutions to which every enterprise is slowly moving. In order to create the pods needed for VDI environments, scalable infrastructures were built to answer the needs of any business size. Along with Cisco's unified computing system and NetApp's storage performance, the team responsible for this service has been able to scale and validate a single FlexPod unit on over 2,000 virtual desktops, along with all necessary support infrastructure, all of that from a single box.

Companies can take advantage of the latest features available in the release, including the validation of a single instance of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and a single instance of Citrix XenDesktop, in order to host up to 2,000 VDI systems. Up to 145 Windows 7 desktops, fully virtualized environments, can save up to 80 percent on efficiency, relative to a similar VDI environment without NetApp.