- Why OpenStack is much more than just hype
- A summary of key OpenStack technologies
- Why to consider converged infrastructure for building private clouds
- The right way to scale-out OpenStack deployments
Watch the webinar here!
//Richard
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Posts Tagged ‘KVM’
OpenStack and Nutanix – perfect match! (perfect with VMware and Microsoft as well of course) – #Nutanix, #OpenStack, #IaaS
May 2, 2014
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This is a good post by Dwayne Lessner around how perfect match OpenStack and Nutanix is (not just OpenStack of course, Nutanix rocks with VMware and Microsoft as well)!
Nutanix NDFS also provides an advanced and unique feature set for OpenStack based
private clouds. Key features include:
- Simplicity – The same great platform that simplified your virtualisation deployment can simplify the compute and storage deployment for key OpenStack services (Glance, Nova, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, and Swift)
- Single Scalable Fabric – NDFS provides a single fabric for data storage that integrates seamlessly with OpenStack services. NDFS-based storage is easy to provision, manage, and operate at scale.
- Hypervisor Agnostic – Just like OpenStack, Nutanix NDFS was designed from the ground up to be hypervisor agnostic. Nutanix enables customers to choose between KVM, Hyper-V, and the VMware ESXi hypervisor for deployments of OpenStack.
- Enterprise Ready – Nutanix enables a full set of enterprise storage features including Elastic Deduplication, Compression, In-Memory and Flash-based Caching, VM-Data Locality, intelligent Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Snapshots, Fast Clones, and Live Migration.
Read more here.
Here you also have the link to the webinar with topic:
Building OpenStack on a Single 2U Appliance
OpenStack promises to be the open source cloud operating system. Automated provisioning and management of network, server and storage resource via a single dashboard is great, but how can you get the same one-stop-shop simplicity for the underlying infrastructure?Attend this advanced private cloud webinar and learn:
Categories: All, Cloud, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack, Storage
Cinder, Cloud, computing, deployment, design, ESXi, Glance, Horizon, Hyper-V, hypervisor, IaaS, Information Lifecycle Management, Keystone, KVM, Life-cycle, Microsoft, NDFS, Nova, Nutanix, Nutanix NDFS, OpenStack, perfect match OpenStack, Platform, private, private clouds, Swift, Virtual, VM, VMWare
Nutanix NX-3000 review: Virtualization cloud-style – #Nutanix, #IaaS
January 29, 2014
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A great review of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform! 🙂
What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an “appliance,” it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.
I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system. Thus, a Nutanix cluster will automatically handle node, disk, and network failures while providing I/O at the speed of local disk — and using local SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently used data. Nutanix systems support the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as KVM for Linux-based workloads.
[ The Nutanix NX-3000 is an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award winner. Read about the other winning products in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]
Nutanix was founded by experienced data center architects and engineers from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. That background brings with it a keen sense of what makes a good distributed system and what software pieces are necessary to build a scalable, high-performance product. A heavy dose of innovation and ingenuity shows up in a sophisticated set of distributed cluster management services, which eliminate any single point of failure, and in features like disk block fingerprinting, which leverages a special Intel instruction set (for computing an SHA-1 hash) to perform data deduplication and to ensure data integrity and redundancy.
A Nutanix cluster starts at one appliance (technically three nodes, allowing for the failure of one node) and scales out to any number of nodes. The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System) provides a single store for all of your VMs, handling all disk and I/O load balancing and eliminating the need to use virtualization platform features like VMware’s Storage DRS. Otherwise, you manage your VMs no differently than you would on any other infrastructure, using VMware’s or Microsoft’s native management tools.
Nutanix architecture
The hardware behind the NX-3000 comes from SuperMicro. Apart from the fact that it squeezes four dual-processor server blades inside one 2U box, it isn’t anything special. All of the magic is in the software. Nutanix uses a combination of open source software, such as Apache Cassandra and ZooKeeper, plus a bevy of in-house developed tools. Nutanix built cluster configuration management services on ZooKeeper and heavily modified Cassandra for use as the primary object store for the cluster.
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Nutanix NX-3000 Series | 10 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
9.3 EXCELLENT
|
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack
availability, built, computing, facebook, Google, Hyper-V, independent servers, KVM, Microsoft, NS, Nutanix, performance, Platform, scalability, Test, Virtual, VMWare, Yahoo
How to pick virtualization (HW, NW, Storage) solution for your #VDI environment? – #Nutanix, @StevenPoitras
September 13, 2013
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Here we are again… a lot of companies and Solution Architects are scratching their heads thinking about how we’re going to do it “this time”.
Most of you out there have something today, probably running XenApp on your VMware or XenServer hypervisor with a FC SAN or something, perhaps provisioned using PVS or just managed individually. There is also most likely a “problem” with talking to the Storage team that manage the storage service for the IaaS service that isn’t built for the type of workloads that XenApp and XenDesktop (VDI) requires.
So how are you going to do it this time? Are you going to challenge the Storage and Server/IaaS service and be innovative and review the new cooler products and capabilities that now exists out there? They are totally changing the way that we build Virtual Cloud Computing solutions where; business agility, simplicity, cost savings, performance and simple scale out is important!
There is no one solution for everything… but I’m getting more and more impressed by some of the “new” players on the market when it comes to providing simple and yet so powerful and performing Virtual Cloud Computing products. One in particular is Nutanix that EnvokeIT has partnered with and they have a truly stunning product.
But as many have written in many great blog posts about choosing your storage solution for your VDI solution you truly need to understand what your service will require from the underlying dependency services. And is it really worth to do it the old way? You have your team that manages the IaaS service, and most of the times it just provides a way for ordering/provisioning VM’s, then the “VDI” team leverages that one using PVS or MCS. Some companies are not even where they can order that VM as a service or provision it from the Image Provisioning (PVS/MCS) service, everything is manual and they call it a IaaS service… is it then a real IaaS service? My answer would be now… but let’s get back to the point I was trying to make!
This HW, Hypervisor, Network, Storage (and sometimes orchestrator) components are often managed by different teams. Each team are also most of the times not really up to date in terms of understanding what a Virtualization/VDI service will require from them and their components. They are very competent in understanding the traditional workload of running a web server VM or similar, but not really dealing with boot storms from hundreds to thousands of VDI’s booting up, people logging in at the same time and the whole pattern of IOPS that is generated in these VM’s “life-cycle”.
This is where I’d suggest everyone to challenge their traditional view on building Virtualization and Storage services for running Hosted Shared Desktop (XenApp/RDS) and Hosted Virtual Desktop (VDI/XenDesktop) on!
You can reduce the complexity, reduce your operational costs and integrate Nutanix as a real power compute part of your internal/private cloud service!
One thing that also is kind of cool is the integration possibilities of the Nutanix product with OpenStack and other cloud management products through its REST API’s. And it supports running both Hyper-V, VMware ESXi and KVM as hypervisors in this lovely bundled product.
If you want the nitty gritty details about this product I highly recommend that you read the Nutanix Bible post by Steven Poitras here.
Categories: Citrix, Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Networking, Nutanix, OpenStack, Storage, VMWare, XenDesktop, XenServer
business agility, Citrix, Cloud, dependency services, hosted shared service, hosted virtual desktop, Hyper-V, hypervisor, KVM, management, MCS, network, Networking, Nutanix, OpenStack, PVS, Services, software, storage, Technology, VDI, virtualization, VMWare, XenApp, XenDesktop
#Apache #CloudStack grows up – #Citrix, #IaaS – via @sjvn
June 4, 2013
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On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator.
It’s also the first major release of CloudStack since Citrix submitted the project to the Apache Foundation in 2012. Apache CloudStack is an integrated software platform that enables users to build a feature-rich IaaS. Apache claims that the new version includes an “intuitive user interface and rich API [application programming interface] for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage resources for private, hybrid, or public clouds.”
This release includes numerous new features and bug fixes from the 4.0.x cycle. It also includes major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers; a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages; and completes the changeover to using Maven, the Apache software project management tool.
Apache CloudStack 4.1.0’s most important new features are:
- An API discovery service that allows an end point to list its supported APIs and their details.
- Added an Events Framework to CloudStack to provide an “event bus” with publish, subscribe, and unsubscribe semantics. Includes a RabbitMQ plug-in that can interact with AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) servers.
- Implement L3 router functionality for the VMware Nicira network virtualization platform (NVP) plug-in
- Support for Linux’s built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization with NVP L3 router
functionality. - Support for AWS (Amazon Web Service) style regions
What all this adds up to, according to CloudStack Project Management Committee (PMC) member Joe Brockmeier, is that today’s CloudStack is “a mature, stable project, [that] is also free as in beer and speech. We believe that if you’re going to be building an IaaS cloud for private or public consumption, you’ll be better served choosing an open platform that any organization can participate in and contribute to.”
Brockmeier concluded, “CloudStack is a very mature offering that’s relatively easy to deploy and manage, and it’s known to power some very large clouds–e.g., Zynga with tens of thousands of nodes–and very distributed clouds–such as DataPipe, which…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Citrix transfers #Xen to the #Linux Foundation – via @scottjcutter
April 16, 2013
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In 2007 Citrix acquired XenSource gaining control over the development of the Xen Hypervisor part of the Xen project. Today Citrix announcedthat it will hand over the Xen Project to the Linux Foundation which will continue its development. After both Ian Pratt and Simon Crosby who came from XenSource left Citrix to start their company Bromium, Citrix has clearly been struggling on how to continue its involvement in the development of the Xen project, leading to this decision.
The following companies will contribute to and guide the Xen Project as founding members of the Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation: Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung and Verizon.
Its interesting to note that the Linux Foundation also supports the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) development, the hypervisor included in…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Citrix, XenServer
Citrix, foundation, foundation amazon, KVM, Linux, Project, simon crosby, software, Technology, Xen, XenServer
The IT Melting Pot! 