Ampere ALTRA – Industry leading ARM64 Server

AmpereComputing were kind enough to send us at our Cloudbase Solutions office the new version of their top-tier server product, which incorporates their latest Ampere ALTRA ARM64 Processor. The server version has a beefy dual-socket AMPERE ALTRA setup, with 24 NVME slots and up to 8 TB installable RAM, spread over 8 channels. Let the…

Ceph on Windows – Performance

Make sure to check out the previous blog post introducing Ceph on Windows, in case you’ve missed it. We are now going to look at how the performance looks like. Before this Ceph Windows porting, the only way to access Ceph storage from Windows was by using the Ceph iSCSI gateway, which can easily become…

Natively using Ceph on Windows

The wait is over, Ceph 16 (Pacific) provides Windows native support as a result of the Cloudbase Solutions and Suse partnership. Ceph is probably the most commonly used software defined storage solution out there. For example, according to surveys, more than 70% of the OpenStack deployments are powered by Ceph. That’s no wonder, considering that…

Python on Windows ARM64

Introduction Python is an interpreted programming language that is used in multiple fields, ranging from education, scientific purposes to DevOps and cloud infrastructure. According to http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html, Python is ranked first in Google’s search popularity. This post is meant to snapshot the current state of the art of the Python ecosystem on Windows ARM64, focusing on…

Deploying OpenStack using Docker containers with Hyper-V and Kolla

OpenStack is a great technology, but it can be a bit cumbersome to deploy and manage without the proper tools. One easy solution to address this issue is to deploy OpenStack services using pre-built Docker containers. Kolla is a set of deployment tools for OpenStack, consisting in the Kolla project itself, for generating OpenStack Docker images, and…

Coriolis v2 – Adding DRaaS to Cloud Migrations

Coriolis v2 – Adding DRaaS to Cloud Migrations

  We’re excited to announce that our Coriolis cloud migration project introduced earlier this year just reached a new important milestone. With the addition of new features specifically aimed at business continuity and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Coriolis now offers both one-off migrations as well as constantly up to date replicas of virtual…

Hyper-V Shielded VMs – Part 2

A Shielded VM is a Hyper-V generation 2 VM that has a virtual TPM, is encrypted using BitLocker and can only run on healthy and approved hosts in the fabric. It is protected from inspection, tampering and theft from malicious fabric admins and host malware, guaranteeing the security of the virtual machines running in an…

Hyper-V Shielded VMs – Part 1

Shielded virtual machines use several features to make it harder for datacenter administrators and malware to inspect, tamper with, or steal data and the state of these virtual machines. Data and state is encrypted, Hyper-V administrators can’t see the video output and disks, and the virtual machines run only on known, healthy hosts, as determined…

Open vSwitch 2.5 on Hyper-V (OpenStack) – Part 1

We are happy to announce the availability of Open vSwitch 2.5 (OVS) for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016 (technical preview) thanks to the joint effort of Cloudbase Solutions, VMware and the rest of the Open vSwitch community. The OVS 2.5 release includes the Open vSwitch CLI tools and services (e.g. ovsdb-server, ovs-vswitchd, ovs-vsctl, ovs-ofctl, etc.), and an updated version…

Announcing project Coriolis – Cloud Migration as a Service

Migrating existing workloads between clouds is a necessity for a large number of use cases, especially for user moving from traditional virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere or Microsoft System Center VMM to Azure / Azure Stack, OpenStack, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. Furthermore, cloud to cloud migrations, like AWS to Azure are also a common requirement. Project Coriolis™ addresses exactly those…

Hyper-Converged OpenStack on Windows Nano Server – Part 2

Nano Server is a new installation option for Windows Server 2016, reducing the overall footprint to just a few hundreds MB of disk space. The resulting deployed OS is thus way faster to deploy and to boot, reducing drastically also the overall amount of updates and reboots required during daily management. In short, it’s an OS built for a cloud age and huge leap forward compared to traditional GUI based Windows deployments.

Hyper-Converged OpenStack on Windows Nano Server

  Introducing the first fully Hyper-Converged Windows® server and OpenStack based cloud infrastructure that eliminates the need for expensive dedicated storage hardware, enabling distributed data across individual cloud servers. In this configuration all nodes have compute, storage and networking roles, increasing scalability and fault tolerance to new levels while drastically reducing the costs.   Hyper-Converged…

Open vSwitch 2.4 on Hyper-V – Part 1

We are happy to announce the availability of the Open vSwitch (OVS) 2.4.0 beta for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016 (technical preview) thanks to the joint effort of Cloudbase Solutions, VMware and the rest of the Open vSwitch community. Furthermore, support for Open vSwitch on OpenStack Hyper-V compute nodes is also available starting with Kilo! The OVS 2.4…

The Open Enterprise Cloud – OpenStack’s Holy Grail?

The way people think about the enterprise IT is changing fast, putting into question many common assumptions on how hardware and software should be designed and deployed. The upending of these long held tenets of Enterprise IT are happening simply due to the innovation brought on by OpenStack and a handful of other successful open…

Open vSwitch on Hyper-V

I’m very excited to announce the availability of the Open vSwitch porting to Microsoft Hyper-V Server beta release. This effort enables a whole new set of interoperability scenarios between Hyper-V and cloud computing platforms like OpenStack where Open vSwitch (OVS) is a very common SDN choice. The porting includes all the Open vSwitch userspace tools and daemons…

Windows support in Ubuntu Juju, MaaS and OpenStack

We’re very pleased to announce a new partnership between Cloudbase Solutions and Canonical for bringing Windows support in Juju and Maas. Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth showed a great demo of OpenStack integration with Hyper-V along with Active Directory, SQL Server and SharePoint Juju charms during the OpenStack summit keynote in Atlanta, providing a clear idea of…

Hyper-V Nova Compute Installer – Unattended setup

A fully automated and unattended setup of Hyper-V Nova compute can be performed in a standard way by passing the proper parameter to msiexec.exe. Features Feature Install by default Notes HyperVNovaCompute True NeutronHyperVAgent True Installs the Neutron Hyper-V Agent and enables Neutron networking in Nova Compute CeilometerComputeAgent False Enables the Ceilometer agents along with the…