Provide the best cloud platform to vSphere

Provide the best cloud platform to vSphere -

At VMworld in 2012 and 2013, we had a very large banner on the Citrix booth with the phrase "Best Cloud Platform vSphere."

as you can imagine, our assertion that Citrix CloudPlatform was the best option has generated interest and skepticism.

now, of course, the term "best" is subjective, and in this post I will outline five reasons why you might also agree that we do, indeed, we have the best option.

1. Easy installation. If you're like me, the installation of new software is the fun bit. It is a necessary evil on the road to do something cool with a new technology. the good news with CloudPlatform is that it installs in one CentOS VM This is true. all the components you need to run an orchestration product in scalable cloud can be installed in minutes in one VM (or single server if you choose).
2. Extensibility. CloudPlatform was designed with service providers in mind, and service providers tend to have some rather large data centers to manage. We have customers with tens of thousands of blades under management; all within the same management plane. There are no hard limits in place, and with the new EC2 Region style container for the availability of areas introduced with this release CloudPlatform 4.2, our fair scalability increased again.
3. flexibility. It is well documented by analysts as the Aberdeen Group, data centers today are no longer the homogeneous VMware stronghold they once were. agility of cloud concepts and flexibility ran directly into the cost of virtual infrastructure provision to create a trend where being able to ignore the hypervisor is a valuable attribute. Abstracting the hypervisor enables operators to target cloud workloads to the most appropriate hypervisor to deliver the desired performance at the best possible point of price. For vSphere, it means being able to draw on the strengths of the support vSphere as complex applications and broad support of the operating system, leaving the workload of public services for hypervisors products base as XenServer and KVM. Since CloudPlatform supports multiple hypervisors out of the box, and allows multiple hypervisor clusters are managed seamlessly within the same management plan, cloud operators can achieve this level of abstraction without requiring end users learn multiple user interfaces.
4. Easy configuration. now, whether you intend to take advantage of multiple hypervisors, if you are reading this, you probably want to take advantage of vSphere as their primary hypervisor. CloudPlatform performs integration with vSphere using vCenter. Adding a vSphere cluster CloudPlatform is accomplished with a simple wizard that requires your credentials for vCenter data center node and cluster name. Once the cluster has been added, all the transactions initiated by CloudPlatform can be seen in newspapers vCenter.
5. entity support. vSphere is more than just a hypervisor; it is a rich virtualization platform, and CloudPlatform natively operates several of these features, including:

• setting to dynamic scaling of resources
• CPU shares
• caps CPU rate
• vMotion
• Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and HA
• OVA models
• VMFS datastores for primary storage
• standard switch
• Virtual Switch Distributed
• Nexus 1000v
• VXLAN
• PVLAN

so if you are interested in seeing for yourself how easy it can be to provide cloud services on vSphere with CloudPlatform, the steps are simple.

1. vSphere clusters Arrangement with vCenter. This may be a version 4.1 on up, but of course some of the available features vary depending on the version and edition vSphere.
2. Download a trial CloudPlatform, and install it in a virtual machine
3. Configure your network to support trunked communication between vSphere clusters
4. Configure shared storage for your vSphere
clusters
5. Set CloudPlatform for your clusters vSphere
6. import some of your favorite VM templates (OVA format) in CloudPlatform, or download a part of the VMware Virtual Appliances market

According to number of nodes in your cluster, this process can take less than an hour to about half a day. Ultimately, you probably also concluded that Citrix CloudPlatform not only offers clear value for cloud based vSphere, but it could well be the "best" option there.

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