Platform9 Presents at Cloud Field Day 21

Introducing Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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In this presentation, Roopak Parikh, CTO of Platform9, introduces the company’s new product, Private Cloud Director, which aims to address the challenges IT managers face when balancing between public and private cloud infrastructures. He begins by drawing an analogy to the Perigian spring tide, where the Earth, moon, and sun align to create extreme tidal forces, likening it to the pressures IT managers face from the rising costs of both public and private cloud solutions. Parikh shares an example of a large corporation that has been using public cloud for five years but found it too expensive, while their private cloud costs are also increasing. This situation, he explains, is common for many organizations that are trying to manage a mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure, including Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare metal servers.

Platform9 has been in the industry for eight years, managing production workloads for various customers, and has developed a deep understanding of the complexities involved in running both virtualized and containerized environments. Parikh highlights that Platform9 has historically offered multiple products to cater to the private cloud market, and with their new Private Cloud Director, they are offering an enterprise-grade, production-ready solution that integrates both containers and virtualization. This solution is designed to be cost-effective and developer-friendly, addressing the needs of organizations that are struggling to manage their hybrid cloud environments. The product is built on years of experience managing large-scale infrastructures, including customers with over 10,000 physical servers and numerous clusters running both virtual machines and containers.

The Private Cloud Director offers three key elements, starting with virtualized clusters, which allow organizations to take their physical servers, virtualize them, and create multiple clusters. These clusters can be used for both virtual machines and containers, providing a unified infrastructure for different workloads. The solution also includes an extension framework that integrates services across both virtualized and containerized environments, offering a seamless experience. Traditionally, Platform9 has provided its solutions as a SaaS-managed service with “always-on assurance,” but they are now also offering a self-hosted version for organizations with specific security or sovereignty requirements. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the deployment model that best fits their needs while maintaining the benefits of a fully integrated cloud management solution.

Personnel: Roopak Parikh

Migrating from VMware to Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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In this presentation, Chris Jones from Platform9 discusses the challenges and solutions involved in migrating from VMware to Platform9’s Private Cloud Director (PCD). He highlights that one of the most common concerns for organizations looking to move away from VMware is the complexity of migrating their virtualized infrastructure. Platform9 has developed a tool, internally named “vJailbreak,” to address these challenges. This tool is designed to help organizations migrate their virtual machines (VMs) from VMware to an OpenStack-based environment, which is the foundation of Platform9’s PCD. The tool is open-source and available on GitHub, and it aims to handle various migration complexities, such as high-performance networking, large data volumes, and minimizing downtime during the migration process.

The presentation also delves into the technical aspects of the migration process. One of the key challenges in migrating VMs between different hypervisors is the compatibility of device drivers, such as storage controllers and network controllers, which may not work seamlessly after migration. Platform9’s solution involves converting virtual disks and ensuring that the necessary drivers are updated during the migration process. The tool also supports both cold and warm migrations, allowing organizations to choose between a quicker migration with downtime or a more seamless migration where the application continues running while the data is being transferred. The flexibility of the tool extends to mapping storage and network configurations between VMware and OpenStack environments, giving administrators control over how resources are allocated in the new environment.

In a live demonstration, Tanay Patankar, Software Engineer, showcases the migration of a Windows-based e-commerce application from VMware to Platform9’s PCD. The demo highlights the ease of use of the vJailbreak tool, which allows administrators to specify credentials, map networks and storage, and configure migration options such as cutover windows and post-migration scripts. The tool also supports bulk migrations, enabling organizations to migrate multiple VMs simultaneously while minimizing service interruptions. The demo concludes by showing that the application server, after migration, continues to communicate with the database server still running in the VMware environment, demonstrating the ability to operate hybrid environments during the migration process.

Personnel: Chris Jones

Platform9 Private Cloud Director Architecture

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Platform9’s Private Cloud Director (PCD) architecture is designed to provide a managed private cloud experience, with distinct components that handle different aspects of the system. The architecture is divided into three main areas: the operations plane, the management plane, and the infrastructure layer. The operations plane is only available for customers who are hosted by Platform9, and it handles tasks like log collection, metrics, and alerting, allowing Platform9 to monitor and manage the infrastructure. For self-hosted customers, these capabilities are not integrated, but they can still use third-party tools like Splunk or Datadog for monitoring. The management plane, which runs on Kubernetes, is responsible for managing APIs, databases, and other core services, and it can be deployed either by Platform9 or by the customer in their own environment.

The process of onboarding servers into PCD is straightforward, thanks to Platform9’s bootstrapping agent, PF9. This agent is deployed on each server and reports back to the management plane, allowing users to configure their infrastructure through the UI or API. The system supports various operating systems like Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS, and Platform9 provides tools like Ansible, Pixie, or Ironic to automate the deployment of hundreds of nodes. Once the servers are onboarded, users can configure enterprise features such as high availability, virtual machine rebalancing, and virtual network creation. Additionally, Kubernetes clusters can be easily created on top of the virtual machines, with Platform9 handling the automation of network and load balancer setup.

Platform9’s architecture also draws parallels to VMware’s ecosystem, with features like DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) being comparable to Platform9’s rebalancing feature. The company acknowledges that for users familiar with VMware, there may be a need for a “Rosetta stone” to translate between VMware’s terminology and Platform9’s offerings. Throughout the presentation, Platform9 aims to highlight these parallels to make the transition easier for users coming from a VMware environment. The architecture is designed to be flexible and scalable, catering to both hosted and self-hosted environments, while providing a robust set of tools for managing private cloud infrastructure.

Personnel: Chris Jones, Roopak Parikh

Platform9 Private Cloud Director Proactive Operations

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This Platform9 presentation at Cloud Field Day 21 focuses on their approach to proactive operations and support, particularly in the context of day-two operations after a cloud migration. Chris Jones emphasized how Platform9 flips the traditional support model by proactively monitoring customer environments 24/7 and reaching out to them when issues arise, rather than waiting for customers to submit support tickets. This proactive approach accounts for a significant portion of their support load, with 65% of tickets being generated by Platform9’s monitoring systems. The company uses a centralized management plane, which integrates with various enterprise monitoring tools like Datadog, Splunk, and Grafana, allowing customers to maintain their existing observability stacks while benefiting from Platform9’s oversight.

The discussion also touched on the challenges of self-hosted environments, where customers may not have the same level of integration with Platform9’s management plane. In these cases, Platform9 provides templates and guidance for integrating with third-party monitoring tools, but customers are responsible for configuring their own log aggregation and monitoring systems. The team acknowledged that while they could offer more operational tools as a service, their current focus is on core virtualization and Kubernetes management, leaving observability to specialized vendors like Datadog. The conversation highlighted the importance of meeting enterprise customers where they are, especially those transitioning from VMware environments, which often come with pre-packaged monitoring solutions like vRealize Operations.

Finally, the presentation covered Platform9’s upgrade strategy and migration capabilities. The company offers a structured upgrade process with one major release and three minor releases per year, allowing customers to schedule upgrades at their convenience. They also provide a “Canary Environment” for testing upgrades before applying them to production. The session concluded with a demonstration of a successful live migration from VMware to Platform9’s environment using their open-source tool, VJLBric, which converts VMware VMDK disks to a raw format for more efficient operation. The tool currently supports VMware as the source and OpenStack as the destination, with potential for future expansion based on customer needs.

Personnel: Chris Jones, Tanay Patankar

Platform9 Cluster Blueprints in Private Cloud Director

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Platform9’s Private Cloud Director aims to simplify the private cloud experience for users, particularly those transitioning from public cloud environments. The platform introduces the concept of “cluster blueprints,” which allow administrators to define a common template for managing clusters of hypervisors. These clusters are essentially groups of co-located hosts that share similar networking and hardware configurations. The platform uses KVM as the underlying hypervisor, which is a widely adopted virtualization technology. One of the key features of the platform is its ability to over-provision resources, allowing users to maximize hardware utilization by running more virtual machines than the physical cores available, based on the assumption that not all VMs will use their full resources simultaneously.

The platform also supports advanced day-two operations, such as live migration and high availability, which are crucial for minimizing downtime during maintenance or hardware failures. Live migration allows workloads to be moved between hosts without downtime, while high availability ensures that workloads can be redistributed in case of hardware failure. The platform’s multi-tenancy feature is designed for managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises, allowing them to create isolated environments for different customers or departments. Each tenant can have its own set of resources, such as virtual machines and networks, while sharing the underlying hardware across the region.

In terms of storage, Platform9 supports a variety of backends, including NFS, NetApp, and Ceph, and allows administrators to configure storage policies based on the needs of specific workloads. The platform also offers flexibility in managing hosts at scale, with features like host aggregates and metadata tagging, which make it easier to filter and manage large numbers of nodes. For large-scale environments, such as those with thousands of nodes spread across multiple regions, the platform provides search and bulk operation capabilities to streamline management tasks. Additionally, the platform integrates with automation tools like Ansible, making it easier to onboard new hosts and scale the infrastructure efficiently.

Personnel: Pooja Ghumre

Software-Defined Networking in Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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Platform9’s presentation at Cloud Field Day 21 focused on their implementation of software-defined networking (SDN) within their Private Cloud Director, which is built on open-source technologies like Open Virtual Network (OVN) and Open Virtual Switch (OVS). This SDN solution is comparable to VMware’s distributed virtual switch, providing packet forwarding and enabling the creation of self-service virtual networks and routers. The platform supports advanced enterprise features such as SRIOV for low-latency applications, IPv6, and dual-stack networking. Security is a key focus, with support for security groups that filter traffic based on IP addresses, ports, and protocols at the L3 and L4 levels. For more advanced use cases, Platform9 offers extensions like DNS, firewall, and load balancer services, with the option to integrate third-party solutions such as InfoBlox, Fortigate, and F5.

The demo portion of the presentation showcased how users can create and manage virtual networks within different tenants, such as QA and Dev environments. The demo illustrated the creation of subnets, virtual routers, and the configuration of external networks for north-south traffic. The platform allows for inter-tenant communication through virtual routers, and public IPs can be associated with virtual machines for external access. Platform9 supports multiple underlay network types, including VLAN, VXLAN, and Geneva, with the flexibility to scale beyond the limitations of VLANs. The platform also allows for self-service users to create virtual networks once the blueprint is set up by the administrator.

In terms of routing and traffic management, Platform9 offers both distributed and centralized routing options. Users can configure routers to handle north-south traffic through specific nodes or distribute routing across multiple servers. Security groups can be customized with inbound and outbound rules based on protocols like TCP, UDP, and ICMP, and more advanced firewall capabilities are in development. The platform also supports policies for east-west traffic isolation within tenant networks, with the option to configure external interfaces for north-south traffic. Overall, Platform9’s SDN solution provides a flexible and scalable networking environment with robust security and integration options for enterprise and multi-tenant use cases.

Personnel: Pooja Ghumre

Virtual Machines, Images, and Volumes in Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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In this presentation, Pooja Ghumre, Principal Engineer at Platform9, discusses the process of creating virtual machines (VMs) within the Platform9 Private Cloud Director. After the initial onboarding and network setup, users can create VMs either from pre-existing images or volumes. Platform9 allows administrators to upload and manage images, which can be designated as public, private, or shared among tenants. The platform supports various storage protocols, including iSCSI, fiber channel, and NFS, providing flexibility in how VMs are deployed. Users can also select from predefined “t-shirt sizes” for VMs, which determine the CPU, memory, and disk requirements, or create custom sizes based on specific needs, such as isolating VMs to certain hardware configurations.

The platform also offers a robust image library, similar to VMware’s vSphere content library, where users can upload new images or use predefined ones like Ubuntu or CentOS. Additionally, users can configure VMs with multiple network interfaces, choose between provider or virtual networks, and apply affinity or anti-affinity rules to control VM placement. Platform9 also supports cloud-init configurations, allowing users to run custom scripts during VM boot-up. Security groups can be applied to filter traffic, and key-value pairs can be added for easier VM management and searchability.

In terms of policy management, Ghumre explains that Platform9 allows users to map VM flavors to host aggregates, which helps in scheduling VMs based on specific performance or resource requirements. This mapping ensures that VMs are placed on the appropriate hosts that meet the defined criteria, such as high-performance storage or specific licensing needs. The platform also supports live migration, enabling users to move VMs between nodes without downtime, further enhancing the flexibility and resilience of the cloud environment.

Personnel: Pooja Ghumre

Multi Tenancy and Self Service in Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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Platform9’s presentation at Cloud Field Day 21 focused on the multi-tenancy and self-service capabilities of their Private Cloud Director. Pooja Ghumre, Principal Engineer, explained how Platform9 allows users to create multiple tenants for different organizations, providing complete isolation between them. Administrators can configure quotas for compute, block storage, and network resources, ensuring that tenants only use the resources allocated to them. Additionally, the platform supports SSO integration for external identity providers and offers features like VM leases, which allow administrators to set time limits on virtual machines, with options to either power off or shut down VMs after expiration.

The presentation also highlighted the platform’s support for infrastructure as code, enabling users to automate complex application deployments using orchestration templates. These templates can define resources such as VMs, volumes, networks, and security groups, and they support auto-scaling based on CPU utilization. Platform9 also integrates with Terraform providers for users who prefer that approach. The platform includes features like virtual machine high availability and resource rebalancing, which ensure that workloads are automatically migrated to active nodes in case of host failures. Resource rebalancing allows administrators to optimize power consumption or distribute resources across hosts, depending on their needs.

In terms of multi-tenancy, Platform9 offers different roles, such as administrator and self-service user, with varying levels of access. Administrators can manage multiple tenants and configure networking and resource settings, while self-service users are limited to their own tenant. The discussion also touched on support for AI/ML workloads, particularly with NVIDIA GPUs. While Platform9 supports running NVIDIA GPUs in virtualized environments, the team recommended using Kubernetes on bare metal for better GPU utilization and flexibility, especially for containerized applications. This approach allows for more efficient use of resources, such as slicing GPUs with MiG, and is better suited for modern AI/ML workloads.

Personnel: Pooja Ghumre

Integrated Kubernetes Control Plane in Platform9 Private Cloud Director

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Platform9’s latest product, Private Cloud Director, introduces a new approach to managing Kubernetes on-premises by eliminating the need for users to manage the control plane. Traditionally, Kubernetes deployments require both control plane nodes and worker nodes, with the control plane being responsible for managing the cluster. In public cloud environments, the control plane is typically managed by the cloud provider, but this is not the case for on-premise deployments. Platform9’s solution moves the control plane services into a management plane, which can be either self-hosted or managed as a SaaS offering by Platform9. This shift allows users to avoid the overhead of managing control plane nodes, which can result in significant resource savings, especially for large-scale deployments with multiple clusters.

The Private Cloud Director is particularly appealing to service providers looking to offer Kubernetes as a service. By offloading the control plane management to Platform9, service providers can focus on their core competencies and go to market faster without the need to build and maintain their own Kubernetes infrastructure. Platform9 also provides backend support for Kubernetes, including Q&A, break-fix, and upgrades, which further reduces the operational burden on service providers. The platform integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure, allowing users to deploy Kubernetes clusters in a manner similar to public cloud services like EKS, AKS, or GKE, but without the need to manage the control plane.

In terms of security and customization, Platform9 offers a default configuration for Kubernetes clusters, which can be further tailored to meet specific customer needs. The platform supports automated upgrades for both the control plane and worker nodes, ensuring that clusters remain up-to-date without diverging too far between versions. Additionally, Platform9 provides optional add-ons, such as Prometheus for monitoring and load balancing services, which can be easily integrated into the Kubernetes environment. This flexibility, combined with the managed control plane, makes Private Cloud Director a compelling solution for organizations looking to simplify their Kubernetes operations while maintaining control over their on-premise infrastructure.

Personnel: Chris Jones