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…
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…
In this post we will focus on the state of virtualization for Windows Hyper-V on ARM64, checking if we can run Windows and Linux virtual machines. This is the second part of the ‘State of Windows on ARM64’ series. Click here for the first part. The test lab consists of 3 Ampere Computing EMAG servers…
We’ve added support for RemoteFX for Windows / Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 back in Kilo, but the highly anticipated Windows / Hyper-V Server 2016 comes with some new nifty features for which we’re excited about! In case you are not familiar with this feature, it allows you to virtualize your GPUs and share them across…
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…
Both Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation / Fusion use the popular VMDK virtual disk format, optionally as part of an OVA package. Here’s a quick HOWTO on converting VMDK disks to the VHD or VHDX formats for Hyper-V or Azure To begin with, if you have a file with the OVA extension (e.g. exported from VirtualBox), this is just…
before reading the conclusions, we recommend to read the previous posts in this series if you want to know more details about the environment and the test scenarios: Introduction, Scenario 1, Scenario 2, Scenario 3. Conclusions It’s time to discuss all the results obtained so far. The table below show the average time expressed in seconds…
We have seen how to setup the benchmarking environment and two simple scenarios (Scenario 1, Scenario 2) in the previous blogposts of this series. This time we are going to add Hadoop to the mix to test a workload with significant memory, CPU and I/O impact. Scenario 3 The image used for this…
We talked about setting up the environment for benchmarking and we have seen in the previous part a simple OpenStack scenario. In this part we are going to continue by adding more complexity to the use case being tested. Scenario 2 In the second scenario a few intermediate steps have been added to increase the…
In the previous part of this OpenStack KVM vs Hyper-V compute benchmarking series we talked about how to setup the testing environment and how to run some scenarios. Time for some results! Scenario 1 To begin with, we started with a basic KVM vs Hyper-V scenario: Ask Nova to boot a VM Wait until Nova…
OpenStack Newton has been recently released. During this cycle we did quite some work on increasing the performance and overall reliability of our Windows and Hyper-V OpenStack compute drivers. This is the first post in a series where we are going to share some of our Hyper-V vs KVM benchmarking results for this OpenStack release, get…
OVS STT setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack
In this post we will explain how to configure manually a Open vSwitch STT tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts.
OVS GRE setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack
In this post we will explain how to configure manually a Open vSwitch GRE tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts.
OVS VXLAN setup on Hyper-V without OpenStack In the previous post we explained how to deploy Open vSwitch (OVS) on Hyper-V and integrate it into an OpenStack environment. In this second part we will explain how to configure manually a VXLAN tunnel between VMs running on Hyper-V and KVM hosts. KVM OVS configuration In this example,…
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…
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…
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…
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.
Our OpenStack Hyper-V Compute Driver works with any OpenStack cloud, including clouds deployed using Mirantis Fuel. The goal of this article is not to provide a guide to deploy Fuel (for that you can use the excellent documentation from Mirantis), but rather to guide you through the process of adding a Hyper-V compute node to an existing Fuel…
As most of you may already know, here at Cloudbase Solutions we love to bridge the gap between Microsoft Windows and open source technologies, starting with OpenStack. Recently we’ve had the opportunity to get our hands on some pretty amazing open source hardware. We are talking about serious hardware that would make any cloud deployer sigh with…
Here’s our second post in the RDO + Hyper-V series targeting Havana and automation. We had lots of great feedbacks about the first post, along with many requests about how to troubleshoot network connectivity issues that arise quite often when you configure a complex environment like a multi-node OpenStack deployment, especially for the first time! Although…
Windows Server 2012 and Windows Storage Server 2012 offer an integrated iSCSI Target service that can be used with Cinder Volume in your stack. Being entirely a software solution, consider it in particular for mid sized networks where the costs of a SAN might be excessive. One of the great advantages of integrating Windows solutions…
DevStack is without any doubt one of the easiest ways to set up an OpenStack environment for testing or development purposes (no production!!). It’s also a great way to test the Hyper-V Nova Compute and Quantum Grizzly beta versions that we are releasing these days! 🙂 Hyper-V Server 2012 is free and can be downloaded…
In a number of scenarios it’s very useful to have different hypervisors in your OpenStack infrastructure, for example you might have KVM or XEN for Linux images and Hyper-V for Windows images. How can you tell Nova Scheduler to associate a given Glance image to a specific hypervisor? The answer is provided by a filter…
We did a lot of work this year on OpenStack and Hyper-V integration, with the result of bringing back Hyper-V in the Nova sources in time for the Folsom release. We are currently working on a lot of cool features to be released in time for Grizzly, so stay tuned! One of our goals was…
Accessing Microsoft’s Hyper-V console is typically performed by running Hyper-V Manager / vmconnect on a Windows Server host or Windows 7 / 8 equipped with RSAT. There are unfortunately quite a few limitations in this approach, including the fact that is not available on the Hyper-V host itself or on other operating systems. Hyper-V console…