Cloudbase Solutions Announces the Industry’s First Platform for Hyper-Converged OpenStack on Windows Nano Server 2016
The Hyper-Converged OpenStack on Windows Server cloud infrastructure enables distributed data across individual cloud servers while dismissing the need for expensive dedicated storage hardware. This particular configuration features all of its nodes having compute, storage and networking roles, thus increasing scalability and fault tolerance to new levels all the while dramatically reducing overall costs.
Hyper-Converged OpenStack on Windows Nano Server 2016
Cloudbase Solutions’ design for the Hyper-Converged data center relies on components that are fully distributed, and is entirely based on commodity hardware, having a remarkably low cost of ownership for the enterprise with the benefit of all the IaaS features offered by OpenStack, for both on-premise as well as public clouds.
Windows in OpenStack
The core components for this solution are OpenStack, Microsoft’s Windows Nano Server 2016, Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Open vSwitch for Hyper-V, deployed starting from the bare metal up with Cloudbase Solutions’ Juju charms for Windows Server.
Cloudbase Solutions offers the platform as managed or unmanaged, with support for OpenStack and Windows Nano Server 2016, along with orchestration solutions based on OpenStack Heat templates or Juju for all Microsoft based workloads, from Active Directory to SharePoint, Exchange and more!
“The Hyper-Converged infrastructure adds simplicity, increased fault tolerance and scalability to your architecture, which is exactly what modern enterprises are looking for in order to compete efficiently. It’s important for OpenStack customers to know they have choices when it comes to their infrastructure, and we see the Hyper-Converged solution as a key to helping them in achieving that architectural freedom” - said Alessandro Pilotti, Cloudbase Solutions CEO
Manage Nano Server and Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V
About Cloudbase Solutions
Cloudbase Solutions™ is dedicated to cloud computing and interoperability. Our mission is to bridge the modern enterprise and cloud computing worlds by bringing OpenStack to Windows-based infrastructures. This effort starts with developing and maintaining all the crucial Windows and Hyper-V OpenStack components and culminates with a product range which includes orchestration for Hyper-V, SQL Server, Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint Server via Juju charms and Heat templates.
Furthermore, to solve the complexity of cloud migration, Cloudbase Solutions developed Coriolis, a cloud migration-as-a-service product for migrating existing Windows and Linux workloads between clouds. Cloud migration is a necessity for a large number of use cases, especially for users moving from traditional virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere or Microsoft System Center VMM to Azure / Azure Stack, OpenStack, Amazon AWS or Google Cloud.
https://cloudbase.it/hyper-c/
Building Your First Ceph Cluster for OpenStack— Fighting for Performance, Solving Tradeoffs
Ceph is a full-featured, yet evolving, software-defined storage (SDS) solution. It’s very popular because of its robust design and scaling capabilities, and it has a thriving open source community. Ceph provides all data access methods (file, object, block) and appeals to IT administrators with its unified storage approach.
In the true spirit of SDS solutions, Ceph can work with commodity hardware or, to put it differently, is not dependent on any vendor-specific hardware. A Ceph storage cluster is intelligent enough to utilize storage and compute the powers of any given hardware, and provides access to virtualized storage resources through the use of ceph-clients or other standard protocol and interfaces.
Ceph storage clusters are based on Reliable Automatic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which uses the CRUSH algorithm to stripe, distribute and replicate data. The CRUSH algorithm originated from a PhD thesis by Sage Weil at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Here’s an overview of Ceph’s different ways for accessing stored data:
The power of Ceph can transform your organization’s IT infrastructure and your ability to manage vast amounts of data. If your organization runs applications with different storage interface needs, Ceph is for you! Ceph’s foundation is the Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS), which provides your applications with object, block, and file system storage in a single unified storage cluster—making Ceph flexible, highly reliable and easy for you to manage.
Ceph’s RADOS provides you with extraordinary data storage scalability—thousands of client hosts or KVMs accessing petabytes to exabytes of data. Each one of your applications can use the object, block or file system interfaces to the same RADOS cluster simultaneously, which means your Ceph storage system serves as a flexible foundation for all of your data storage needs. You can use Ceph for free, and deploy it on economical commodity hardware. Ceph is a better way to store data.
OpenStack Australia Day 2016 - Andrew Hatfield, Red Hat: The Future of Cloud Software Defined Storage
The Ceph Storage Cluster
A Ceph storage cluster is a heterogeneous group of compute and storage resources (bare metal servers, virtual machines and even Docker instances) often called Ceph nodes, where each member of the cluster is either working as a monitor (MON) or object storage device (OSD). A Ceph storage cluster is used by Ceph clients to store their data directly as RADOS objects or by using virtualized resources like RDBs or other interfaces.
Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar
Windows and OpenStack - What's New in Windows Server 2016
Windows and OpenStack: What’s new in Windows Server 2016? - Alessandro Pilotti from ITCamp on Vimeo.
OpenStack is getting big in the enterprise, which is traditionally very Microsoft centeric. This session will show you everything you need to know about Windows in OpenStack!To begin with we will show how to provision Windows images for OpenStack, including Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7, 8.1 and the brand new Windows Server 2016 Nano Server for KVM, Hyper-V and ESXi Nova hosts.
Next, we will show how to deploy Windows workloads with Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange using Heat templates, Juju, Puppet and more.
Last but not least, we'll talk about Active Directory integration in Keystone, Hyper-V deployment and Windows bare metal support in Ironic and MaaS. The session will give you a comprehensive view on how well OpenStack and Windows can be integrated, along with a great interoperability story with Linux workloads.
Exploring Nano Server for Windows Server 2016 with Jeffrey Snover
For More Information:
http://superuser.openstack.org/
https://news.microsoft.com/2010/10/22/openstack-is-now-open-for-windows-server/#sm.0001a9okhkyn3dd0uql216jjob0ut
https://www.openstack.org/summit/tokyo-2015/videos/presentation/windows-in-openstack
http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/getting-hyper-v-and-openstack-set-up-quickly/
http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/how-to-introduce-openstack-in-your-organization/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/virtual_pc_guy/2015/08/25/getting-hyper-v-and-openstack-setup-quickly/
https://www.suse.com/newsroom/post/2016/suse-wins-best-software-defined-solution-for-openstack-cloud-and-ceph-storage-offerings/
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/05/mashing-openstack-hyperconverged-storage/
http://www.stratoscale.com/blog/stratoscale-labs/building-a-hyper-converged-openstack-cloud-with-stratoscale/
http://ceph.com/ceph-storage/
http://thenewstack.io/software-defined-storage-ceph-way/