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…

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…

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…

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.

Multi-node OpenStack RDO on RHEL and Hyper-V – Part 2

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…