Tag: Microsoft Hyper-V

Egenera’s Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Now Supports Microsoft Hyper-V

Egenera, a Boxborough, MA-based company specializing in cloud infrastructure management, recently announced a new release of its Egenera Cloud Suite platform for provisioning “physical, virtual, and public cloud resources” from within the purview of a single management interface. The new release serves the needs of both enterprises and cloud service providers that face the challenge of managing workloads within public cloud infrastructures and on premise environments. Enhancements to the Egenera Cloud Suite platform, which combines the PAN Cloud Director, PAN Manager and PAN Domain Manager, include support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Active Directory, more granular role-based access controls and improvements to billing and templating that streamline and automate workflows.

Given that enterprises increasingly leverage combinations of on premise and public cloud environments to differentially accommodate the needs of test, development and production environments, the ability of the Egenera PAN Manager and PAN Cloud Director to comprehensively manage varied hosting infrastructures positions it strongly to manage hybrid clouds, the most common use case for cloud deployments since comparatively few organizations pursue a “cloud only” solution. Egenera’s recent release builds on this summer’s integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), whereby AWS is now part of the standard service catalog within its Pan Cloud Director service catalog. Meanwhile, this week’s release marks a significant breakthrough for Egenera, which now expands its purview to virtualized environments supported by the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor due to requests from many of its customers, as noted in an interview with Cloud Computing Today.

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7 Key Features Of OpenStack Grizzly

OpenStack Grizzly was launched on April 4, 2013 and contains over 230 new features that enhance the OpenStack platform’s computing power and ability to integrate with other technologies. The release was enabled by the collective work of 517 contributors who merged 7,620 software patches. More than 45 companies employed developers that contributed to the release including Red Hat, Rackspace, IBM, HP, Nebula, Intel, eNovance, Canonical, VMware, Cloudscaling, DreamHost and SINA. Given that OpenStack is used in production environments by the likes of Best Buy, Comcast, CERN, HP, NSA and Samsung, the Grizzly release focused on supporting the day to day operational work required to manage IaaS platforms based on OpenStack distributions.

Key features of Grizzly include the following:

•Support for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, whereas previously OpenStack had focused on the KVM and Xen hypervisors.
•Support for bare metal provisioning
•Enhanced OpenStack compute scalability by means of “cells” that manage distributed clusters alongside a design that reduces the centrality of a core database via a “NoDB” architecture
•Enhanced ability to automate the management of storage platforms by means of quotas
•Ability to manage diverse storage platforms from a central point of access
•Support for additional third party storage solutions such as Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara.
•Advanced support for software defined networking (SDN) that allows users to write rules to configure networking infrastructures from a broad array of virtualized networking platforms that now includes Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet. Previously, OpenStack had supported the Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow SDN platforms.

Jonathon Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, remarked on the maturity of the OpenStack software development process as follows:

The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds. The community delivered another packed release on schedule, attracting contributions from some of the brightest technologists across virtualisation, storage, networking, security, and systems engineering. They are not only solving the complex problems of cloud, but driving the entire technology industry forward.

Here, Bryce notes how OpenStack Grizzly features important enhancements across a wide range of attributes such as virtualization, storage and networking. Central to these enhancements is a significant increase in OpenStack’s ability to integrate with other virtualization, storage and networking vendors in ways that dramatically enhance the attractiveness of the OpenStack product given the inherent heterogeneity of enterprise IT platforms. Expect subsequent releases to add more orchestration and automation to the OpenStack platform, most likely beginning with the Havana release in October 2013.