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Microsoft has released a series of instruction guides for setting up hybrid cloud environments, including putting together a SharePoint intranet farm and a web-based line of business application in a hybrid cloud.

The tech giant cites a lack of previous resources in this field as the reason for putting pen to paper – while there is plenty of content out there for creating a test environment in a cloud-only virtual network, for instance, hybrid environments have scant documentation in comparison.

For the tutorial on setting up a hybrid cloud environment, the configuration provides a basis and starting point for users to develop and test apps, as well as create test configurations of computers on the Corpnet subnet and within the TestVNET virtual network.

“When complete you can begin performing application development, experimenting with simplified IT workloads, and gauge the performance of a site-to-site VPN connection relative to your location on the Internet,” explained senior content developer Joe Davies in a blog post.

Hybrid has been given a kick start in recent news, thanks to VMware’s announcements about its hybrid cloud strategy going forward, which was then criticised by Red Hat. The open source tech provider described VMware’s vision of a unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud was “fundamentally flawed”, adding  that its own solution, through an open hybrid cloud approach, was superior.  

A survey in March 2014 from Microsoft showed almost half (49%) of more than 2000 execs polled had deployed some form of hybrid cloud. These most recent guides, however, show that while the idea of hybrid cloud is a nice one for IT professionals to grasp, setting up and testing a deployment is another issue entirely.

You can find the full documentation here.