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.
Microsoft Hyper-V is an amazing hypervisor very well supported in OpenStack, with Nova, Neutron and Ceilometer drivers and agents. This charm includes also Open vSwitch for Hyper-V allowing full interoperability with KVM, ESXi and more, using VXLAN and VLAN based software defined networking.
Cinder includes two Windows specific volume drivers that we contributed for managing the Windows iSCSI Target Server and Windows File Server (SMB) shares. Both drivers are supported by Nova for both KVM and Hyper-V compute nodes.
Active Directory (AD) is the central identity role in any Windows based enterprise deployment. It’s an extremely simple and powerful technology that since it’s introduction in Windows 2000 encountered an amazing success. The Active Directory charm deploys a fully scalable and fault tolerant domain infrastructure. Each node includes Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) as part of the same domain, leveraging the Active Directory built-in replication for fault tolerance and load balancing.
Microsoft SharePoint is a popular web application framework and platform developed by Microsoft. It is often used for corporate intranets, document management, collaboration and business intelligence. Its ASP.Net based development along with a management interface meant for non technical users made it a very widespread choice. Our SharePoint charm deploys a farm scaling on one or more nodes. Relationships with the SQL Server and Active Directory charms make the deployment extremely simple, reducing to a handful of minutes what used to take days to install and configure manually.
Microsoft Exchange Server is a widely adopted mail server, contact manager and calendaring software. Although in recent years many companies preferred to migrate their email management to public cloud services like Office 365 or Google+, a large market segment still prefers to manage email mailboxes directly, often in a private cloud. Our Exchange charms provides all the benefits of both worlds: the ease of management of public clouds along with the privacy offered by a private cloud, including transparent scalability with Data Availability Groups (DAG) on multiple nodes.
SQL Server Express is the free edition, but don’t let the name fool you: it includes most of the tools available in other editions and unless you have large workloads and scalability requirements it fits the bill very well. This charm is also freely available!
This charm builds directly on top of the features already offered by the SQL Server Express charm, including all the features provide by Microsoft SQL Server Standard or Enterprise and most important, support for AlwaysOn Availability Groups when deployed in conjunction with the Failover Clustering and Active Directory charms. This allows a great degree of fault tolerance and scalability in no time, by simply increasing the number on nodes deployed by the charm.
The protocol used by Windows file servers, Server Message Block (SMB) is mostly used as synonymous for file share. This charm not only configures the sharing configurations of a Windows Server, but it also configures the disks attached to the instance with Storage Spaces, providing an amazing level of performance and high availability. When used in conjunction with the Failover Clustering charm, the nodes form a Scale-Out File Server that can be used by the OpenStack Windows Cinder charm along with our SMB3 volume driver.
Virtual desktops are one of the leading use cases for Windows in private clouds. This spans multiple scenarios, including banking, help desks, development automated builds, testing and more. Our VDI charm deploys Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 or Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 instances, handles Active Directory domain membership and takes care of the desktop initialization. VDI is best experienced on Hyper-V thanks to the RemoteFX support included in our Nova driver, but it works perfectly fine on KVM, other hypervisors and bare metal as well.
Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is the de facto standard high availability technology in Windows, where a group of servers (nodes) works together to increase the availability and scalability of clustered resources. In case of failure of individual resources or one or more nodes, failed resources are automatically restarted on the remaining nodes. In order to ensure always a majority when assessing which nodes should control the cluster, an odd number of hosts is needed or alternatively a file server (deployed with the Windows File Server charm) can be added in a “witness” role.
The Failover Clustering charm requires a relationship with the Active Directory charm and manages automatically the cluster membership when the number of nodes increases, allowing an amazingly scalable solution. The Failover Clustering charm is used in conjunction with other charms, for example in the SQL Server AlwaysOn use case.
A critical aspect of every enterprise deployment is the ability to manage security vulnerabilities and updates in a controlled and automated way. Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) provides a centralized way to assess and distribute updates to group of servers typically controlled by Active Directory group policies.
Our WSUS charm automates the deployment and configuration of a WSUS service and the related member hosts by leveraging a relationship with the Active Directory charm.
