Platform9 features comparable to VMware

Why Platform9 is a better replacement for VMware

Platform9 Managed OpenStack (PMO) is a full enterprise-featured VMware replacement, that enables you to create an agile private cloud deployment on your infrastructure that is fully automated and highly scalable. PMO deploys, manages, upgrades, and monitors your OpenStack cloud on your infrastructure located on-premises, in colocations or at the edge.

Delivering an intuitive and modern point-and-click user interface, PMO simplifies all aspects of operating a virtualized environment at scale by remotely managing and monitoring every component of your deployment.

PMO is a perfect option for VMware administrators who are considering KVM / OpenStack as an alternative hypervisor, but are either new to OpenStack or are concerned about the complexity of operating OpenStack. Engineers from Platform9 many of whom worked at VMware or have extensive experience using VMware, have developed and operated OpenStack for almost 8 years.

As a VMware administrator or a self-service user, you can set up and interact with various components of PMO through the Clarity SaaS portal, with zero knowledge of OpenStack, or OpenStack CLI commands. With a few simple clicks, your Platform9 dashboard starts offering visibility into your infrastructure across compute, storage, network, and existing workloads, and your OpenStack cloud is live. And as a Platform9 cloud administrator, you can configure and manage OpenStack resources that are to be used by self-service users, with Clarity.

PMO uses a powerful cloud hosted management plane that remotely deploys, manages, monitors, and upgrades your OpenStack private cloud environment on your on-premises infrastructure, including your servers, storage, and networking. This deployment model enables us to guarantee 24x7x365 SLA for your virtualized environment.

PMO Architecture

PMO is a SaaS-managed virtualization offering that’s designed to help you make use of all the benefits of OpenStack, while ensuring you can run large scale, production ready, multi-cluster deployments of virtualization that meet your business SLA.

When we create a new deployment of PMO for you or your organization, it consists of following key components:

• A cloud-hosted management plane is deployed and configured to include key components of your PMO control plane. This management plane maintains connectivity to your on-premise infrastructure via a software agents or gateway virtual appliance installed in your on-premise environment.
• Any additional necessary components – such as Platform9 host agents and / or Platform9 gateway virtual appliance – installed by Platform9 on your infrastructure. These enable our SaaS hosted management plane to access and manage your infrastructure remotely.

Read more: https://platform9.com/docs/openstack-docs/openstack/introduction-architecture

Self-Service Resource Provisioning & Management

With Platform9 Managed OpenStack (PMO), any user, including developers, are able to quickly and easily build Virtual Machine (VM) instances. Platform9 also enables developers to launch multi-tier applications that are composed of multiple VMs with a single click.

Live Migration of Virtual Machines

Platform9 Managed OpenStack supports live migration on KVM. The VM or application downtime during a live migration is very small or negligible. Live migration is performed in the following scenarios.

• It is not possible to bring down the running applications or VMs and have downtime for a cold migration.
• It is necessary to redistribute the load of multiple VMs running on the same physical machine.

High Availability (HA) for Virtual Machines

PMO provides out of the box HA, with automatic VM restart on host failure, ensuring minimal downtime for critical workloads. HA is enabled by pf9-hamgr service for node failure detection using consul. PMO utilizes Masakari for host evacuation once failure is detected. Refer here for more information on the VM HA architecture in PMO.

Identity Management & Federation

PMO supports sign in with Single Sign-on (SSO) Credentials. You can sign in to PMO by using Identity Access Management (IAM) solutions like Okta, OneLogin, and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services.

If your organization is using one of the above-mentioned IAM solutions for single sign-on to all web-based applications, you can use the IAM single sign-on (SSO) credentials to sign in to Clarity. SSO must be enabled on your account for you to be able to log in using IAM credentials.

With SSO integration, you no longer need to create individual username and password based accounts for your Platform9 Managed OpenStack users. This allows for easier integration across groups of users and different organizations in your environment, since users maintain a single login and password across various tools in the environment, including Platform9 Managed OpenStack.

Quota Management

PMO provides comprehensive capabilities to manage tenant quotas and VM leases.

Quote management is available at a granular level for compute, storage, and network resources. VM leases can be configured at the tenant level and also honor the quota management policies.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

PMO Networking enables the use of Software Defined Networks (SDN) enabling an administrator to define complex, virtual network topologies using VLAN / overlay networking (GRE/VXLAN), and isolated L3 domains within the OpenStack environment.

A typical Neutron-enabled environment requires either having one or more hosts configured as the network nodes, or having Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR) configured across all your hypervisors. In a configuration that uses dedicated network nodes, the node serves as the egress point for north-south traffic for the cloud. The node also provides layer 3 routing between tenant networks created in PMO.

Firewall Policies

PMO enables virtual firewalls via security groups that consist of a set of rules to control the inbound network traffic and outbound network traffic. When the security group is associated with or assigned to an instance, it controls the inbound network traffic to the instance and outbound network traffic from the instance. You can create a security group to control TCP, UDP and ICMP traffic.

Storage Area Network (SAN) Integration

PMO provides storage integration with your existing or new block storage technologies, and support for operations such as creation, deletion, snapshot, upload-to-glance-image, attach and detach can be done through the Platform9 UI.

SR-IOV / GPU Support

PMO has features to configure GPUs and Accelerator cards passthrough and support for virtual GPUs.

GPUs and Accelerator cards installed on your PMO hosts can be passed through entirely or as virtual devices to virtual machines running in your PMO cloud. Any card that is capable of functioning as virtual GPU or passthrough or both via applicable drivers on the upstream OpenStack version ‘Rocky’ and later versions of OpenStack will function in PMO as well on supported hypervisor types.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

PMO offers backup and restore functionality, but the process may require integration with third-party tools and additional configuration.

Phased and fully-supported migration process from VMware to OpenStack

Platform9 is with you at every step of your migration journey. With a well-defined process, our solution architects can get into into production on OpenStack in just a few weeks.

Automated migration tools with live replication

Platform9 works with partners and/or provides native automated tools to migrate thousands of VMs from VMware to openStack. Typical steps would include:

1. Start replication
2. Store data
3. Automate orchestration
4. Spin up test migrations
5. Run final cutover