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 Design
In our Hyper-Converged design, components are fully distributed and entirely based on commodity hardware with an unprecedented low TCO for the enterprise, on-premises as well as on public clouds. The core components for this solution are OpenStack, Microsoft’s Windows Nano Server, Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct, deployed starting from the bare metal up with Cloudbase Solution’s Juju charms for Windows and v-magine™.
Nano Server
Microsoft’s Nano Server is the new lightweight member of the Windows server family available with Windows Server 2016, introduced as a “purpose-built operating system designed to run born-in-the-cloud applications and containers”, optimized for cloud workloads and with an extremely small footprint. It has been designed to enable super fast bare metal deployments, limited number of updates (and thus reboots), better usage of resources, a much tighter security, limited memory and storage footprints (both being hot commodities in the cloud). Nano Server is currently available in technical preview and scheduled for release in 2016.
Hyper-V
Hyper-V, included in Nano Server, is Microsoft’s hypervisor technology, fully integrated in OpenStack thanks to Cloudbase Solutions’s Nova compute driver technology. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016 includes new unique features like Shielded VMs, Windows Containers and nested virtualization enforcing its leading position in the enterprise market.
Storage Spaces Direct
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is a revolutionary software defined storage solution included in Windows Server 2016, offering the same advantages of the Storage Spaces feature added in Windows Server 2012 R2 but without the need for shared storage, which previously required large investments in hardware. Storage Spaces Directed is fully supported in OpenStack with Cloudbase Solutions’s Cinder SMB3 driver.
Fault tolerance is achieved by mirroring data across multiple hosts and leveraging the Scale-Out File Server feature integrated with Windows Server Failover Clustering. For optimal performance, SMB Direct / RDMA enabled network adapters are supported to manage storage related traffic with a minimum impact on the host CPUs.
Networking
This platform supports distributed virtual routing based on Windows Server 2016, OpenStack Neutron and Open vSwitch (ported by Cloudbase Solutions to Hyper-V in conjunction with VMWare and the OVS community), with support for other leading third party networking solutions planned for the near future.
Deployment
The components are easily deployed by using Cloudbase Solutions’ v-magine™, a 1-click OpenStack deployment-in-a-box platform together with Juju, the game-changing service modelling tool that lets you build entire cloud environments with only a few commands.
Fully automated fabric deployment, management and monitoring is included, meaning that users will just need to bring their servers, letting the tools do all the deployment work.
Support
Microsoft supports Windows instances running on Hyper-V, regardless of the fabric controller in use, including also OpenStack. All you need is any familiar Microsoft licensing options like SPLA or Volume Licensing. Selected leading Linux distributions with LIS components are also supported.
Cloudbase Solutions offers managed and unmanaged support for OpenStack and Windows Server integration, along with orchestration solutions based on OpenStack Heat templates or Juju for all the leading Microsoft based workloads: Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Failover Clustering and more.
Availability
The OpenStack Hyper-Converged Hyper-V cloud is currently available for technical preview and will be released in conjunction with the Windows Server 2016 release. Contact us for a trial copy and for more information!
If you are attending the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, between October 27th – 30th 2015, come to our booth (#T32) for a live demo!
