Why choose Platform9 for your private cloud needs?
The IT landscape is rapidly evolving, and enterprises realize that private cloud solutions are required to unlock greater operational agility, cost-efficiency, and control over their infrastructure. However, disruptive changes to enterprise cloud solution providers have IT teams challenged with vendor lock-in, skyrocketing costs, and capability gaps for desired private cloud agility.
That’s where Platform9 Private Cloud Director comes in. Private Cloud Director is an easy-to-use platform that turns existing infrastructure into a fully-featured private cloud. But does it have the enterprise features that IT organizations have come to expect?
Efficient infrastructure utilization with Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR)
Private cloud infrastructure relies on clusters of servers that host hypervisor software, and, of course, virtual workloads. It’s vital to have a way to manage the resources on these clusters, to ensure that applications running on them are always available and that work is spread effectively across servers.
To deliver this capability, Platform9 has integrated Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR), a resource scheduling and load balancing system within Private Cloud Director. DRR automates resource rebalancing, ensuring increased agility in efficient workload management within a cluster. Those familiar with VMware would equate this feature to the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) utility.
DRR handles cluster capacity allocation, determines the resources a workload may need, and then assigns that resource to the appropriate cluster node. It also monitors capacity utilization, ensuring effective workload management across cluster resources over time.
DRR is enabled by default when a cluster is created, and will automatically balance resource loads evenly across hosts in a cluster.
Operational resiliency with Virtual Machine High Availability
High availability (HA) of workloads running on virtual machines in the event of hypervisor infrastructure failure is a critical private cloud feature for enterprises. Platform9 has delivered this crucial requirement with Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA).
When a cluster is created, VM HA is enabled by default. This feature provides automatic recovery of VMs after a host failure to ensure business continuity, minimize downtime, and maintain critical operations.
At the time of this writing, HA requires a minimum of four hosts present within a cluster. If needed, HA can be disabled in the case it’s not desired or there are not four hosts in the cluster. However, expansion of HA capabilities (including support for two-node HA) is on the roadmap for a future release.
In the graphic below, we see the VMs on host03 become offline as the underlying host is unavailable, then they are brought back online on the remaining hosts in the cluster.
Seamless workload migration in private cloud environments
To achieve maximum resiliency of private cloud resources, workloads must seamlessly migrate between nodes of a cluster. To achieve this foundational capability, Platform9 has integrated Live Migration. Those familiar with VMware will know the Live Migration process as vMotion. This key feature enables moving VMs from one machine to another, while maintaining operational delivery of all VM applications.
Live Migration works by transferring the running VM’s memory, network connectivity, and storage (if the hosts share storage) from the original host to the new host. This feature allows IT to perform maintenance and upgrades without disrupting service. This helps ensure cluster scalability and improves users’ experience with improved application uptime.
Achieving zero downtime with storage live migration
Storage Live Migration is a process that extends application resiliency by ensuring that the VM’s underlying storage is migrated to the new host. If you’ve worked with VMware, you know this process as Storage vMotion.
Platform9 Private Cloud Director supports the live migration of ephemeral/local storage, as well as attached block storage, and keeps data accessible and secure during migrations. Utilization of this capability can help deliver storage consolidation for better resource utilization and performance, help ensure uptime during storage maintenance and upgrade, and deliver load balancing across storage pools, delivering improved application performance. When used in a disaster recovery situation, it’s also invaluable for reducing downtime and the risk of complete data loss.
Additionally, storage live migration provides a way to change the block storage backend. It’s as simple as choosing the “Retype” option in the Private Cloud Director Volumes tab to move a volume from one type of storage to another.
Trust Platform9 for your private cloud
The Platform9 Private Cloud Director is a powerful foundation for an agile private cloud, as well as a familiar experience for IT operators. Private Cloud Director features all the core capabilities required by the enterprise. Many organizations are tapping Private Cloud Director to run large scale private clouds today, with seamless migration from legacy cloud software stacks and operation on existing server and storage infrastructure.
The Platform9 Private Cloud Director is a comprehensive, intuitive platform designed to meet the challenges of the rapidly evolving IT landscape. Experience it for yourself by requesting a demo today.
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