You're used to managing your public cloud environments in enStratus. A single interface to manage operations within a single cloud or across multiple clouds. You might even be using enStratus to manage a Eucalyptus or Cloud.com based cloud.
Today we announced support for something quite uncloudy—managing a virtualized VMware vSphere infrastructure as if it were a private cloud. Many people are asking us what exactly this means.
Setup
It's possible to take the enStratus SaaS offering and point it to your vSphere SDK endpoint and have an instant cloud-like environment. enStratus will auto-discover all of the resources you have in that VMware infrastructure and immediately enable unified chargeback tracking between your VMware private "cloud" and your public clouds. That's not really what's exciting about this rollout however.
Setup of a true cloud environment with enStratus + vSphere requires the following:
- Setup of a DHCP host within the same VLAN(s) as your virtual machines
- Defining supported server "sizes" (e.g. 1 CPU with 512M RAM, 8 CPU with 64G RAM, etc.)
- Defining chargebacks for various server size, operating system, and software combos
- Setting up baseline templates that will be used to support new VMs. Baseline templates require VMware tools. The enStratus agent is optional.
Once setup, enStratus auto-discovers your VMware infrastructure and begins tracking the costs assigned to that infrastructure.
Using Your Cloud
At this point, you can setup users and access right within enStratus. Users will be able to do only the things you prescribe for their roles and they can launch only VMs from the templates you defined using one of the server sizes you defined for the cloud. In other words, it looks just like any other enStratus-supported private cloud.
Here's what we support in the current build:
- Provisioning/de-provisioning of VMs based on pre-configured templates and VM sizes
- Creating custom templates based on running VMs
- Budgeting in chargebacks, including tracking costs for a given budget across all clouds
- User management through LDAP and ActiveDirectory
- Configurable user roles and policy enforcment
- Auto-scaling, auto-recovery, and automated backups
- Automated backups into the public cloud for "off-site" backups
- Monitoring and alerting of your private cloud infrastructure
- Intrusion detection system integration
- Automated DR into any public cloud
- Multi-tenancy
And here's what is coming in July:
- Automated cloud-bursting from your private cloud into a public cloud
- Ability to span a single system based on functionally across a private and public cloud
- Support for configurable virtual disks
- Configurable public IP address management
- Support for F5 load balancers
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