Platform9 Expands Private Cloud Management Capabilities With Dynamic Network Provisioning for VMware vSphere and KVM
Platform9, the company making private clouds easy, today announced beta support for OpenStack Neutron, providing customers with a turnkey solution for dynamically provisioning networks within vSphere and KVM environments. The company also announced general availability of its support for OpenStack Heat for orchestration as well as for OpenStack Ceilometer for programmatic alerts and event notifications.
Today’s announcements follow the company’s support for OpenStack Cinder last month, which enables customers to leverage the storage subsystem of their choice to provide persistent block storage in their vSphere- or KVM-powered private cloud. All of these capabilities further strengthen Platform9’s unique managed private cloud solution, providing out-of-the-box automation that eliminates complex manual processes and the need for specialized skills, simplifying and accelerating IT service delivery.
“Customers are excited by the power and potential of OpenStack, but they are often derailed by its complexity and lack the specific skills to stand up and maintain an OpenStack-powered private cloud,” said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and vice president of products. “Today’s news demonstrates how we continue to make private clouds easy for customers. For example, network provisioning with Neutron — which has been one of our most highly requested and anticipated new features to date — is a simple wizard-driven exercise with Platform9. It takes just minutes, not hours or days, and can be accomplished with zero knowledge of OpenStack. It just works.”
OpenStack Neutron is a major component within the OpenStack private cloud framework, exposing a range of network provisioning functionality such as creating networks, virtual routers, configurations such as security groups, load balancers and more. Typically, IT teams find it exceedingly difficult to architect and integrate Neutron to work at scale in production, often contributing to stalled private cloud projects. Platform9 removes these barriers with built-in support for common network configurations such as Open vSwitch (OVS) and VMware’s Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) that work out of the box and are backed with a service-level agreement (SLA).
Enabling “Infrastructure as Code” with Orchestration
Many organizations are modernizing operational processes, transitioning from manually provisioned workloads to an infrastructure-as-code paradigm in which cloud-based applications consume infrastructure as code. Similar to AWS CloudFormations, OpenStack Heat supports application blueprints that enable specifying infrastructure requirements for modern applications via a markup language, with the Heat framework automating the provisioning of infrastructure across OpenStack services as the application is deployed. By adding support for OpenStack Heat, Platform9 makes it easy for the large installed base of VMware and Linux customers to start their transformation from a static IT environment toward infrastructure-as-code within their private cloud environments.
Programmatic Alerts and Notifications
In addition, Platform9’s support for OpenStack Ceilometer is now generally available, enabling the use of programmatic alerts and event notifications. These in turn can be used to trigger orchestration policies via Heat.
Product Availability
Platform9 support for OpenStack Neutron will be generally available in the first half of 2016. Support for OpenStack Heat, OpenStack Ceilometer, and OpenStack Cinder is generally available now.