Analyst(s): Alastair Cooke
Publication Date: November 6, 2024
Platform9 announced their Private Cloud Director product launch and showcased the product at Cloud Field Day 21. The management plane runs in the cloud as a service, while the KVM-based hypervisor can replace the customer’s existing on-premises virtualization platform.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Platform9 launched a cloud-managed on-premises virtualization platform called Private Cloud Director
- Platform9 is a strong provider for medium and large organizations looking at alternatives to VMware
- Private Cloud Director includes tools for large-scale automated migration of existing VMs to Platform9 virtualization
The News: Platform9 announced their Private Cloud Director product launch and showcased the product at Cloud Field Day 21. The management plane runs in the cloud as a service, while the KVM-based hypervisor can replace the customer’s existing on-premises virtualization platform.
Platform9 Delivers On-Premises Private Cloud as a Service
Analyst Take: Platform9 is a mature company with mature products, delivering on-premises Kubernetes and private cloud as a service for many years. The recently launched Private Cloud Director product builds on this foundation to offer an option for customers considering a move away from VMware’s products for their on-premises virtualization needs. Private Cloud Director offers scalability for multiple sites, whether multiple data centers or thousands of edge locations, while supporting many existing servers and storage systems. The migration tools allow automated migration from an existing vSphere environment.
Scalability is a vital element of the Platform9 solution. One customer deploys the platform as a small cluster at each of their several thousand retail sites. These sites benefit from orchestration for deployment and ongoing maintenance to minimize the need for on-site expertise. Another customer has hundreds of servers at a single site, all managed by a single Private Cloud Director interface. For service providers or large enterprises, Private Cloud Director has multi-tenant capabilities to have segregated groups of VMs on a single shared cluster.
The underlying technology in Private Cloud Director starts with the KVM hypervisor and includes software-defined networking and storage from the OpenStack software suite. The entire stack is managed through a Platform9 web interface, either using their cloud service or deployed on-premises for customers who cannot use the cloud service. Having KVM as the base allows the on-premises private cloud as a service to use existing storage, such as Fiber Channel, NFS, or iSCSI, to store VMs, while the OpenStack elements include support for CEPH as a storage provider using commodity servers.
A strong partner ecosystem is essential for larger organizations. Data protection, disaster recovery, operations management, and hardware interoperability must be in place. Platform9 provides an operations dashboard in its SaaS platform and can leverage the large ecosystem around OpenStack to help customers. The SaaS model allows Platform9 to manage the OpenStack side, removing much of the complexity of OpenStack. Deployment is simple. An agent installed on a Linux server manages all the required server configurations. The agent deployment can easily be integrated into any Linux operating system installation process such as a PXE network.
One of the significant factors for migrating from one virtualization platform to another is the availability of VM bulk migration tools. Migrating a few hundred VMs from one hypervisor to another is a significant task and migrating thousands of VMs requires a much more automated process. The Platform9 migration tool has a scale-out architecture that can replicate and migrate multiple VMs with either automatic or manually controlled cutover timing. The original VMs remain online during replication, leading to only a brief outage for cutover. The migration tools include mapping of existing vSphere resources to Private Cloud Director resources. Network coexistence allows migrated VMs to communicate with non-migrated VMs, allowing phased migration and reducing risk during migration.
Many traditional VMware customers are considering alternatives to their vSphere clusters. Platform9 wants to be that alternative for medium or large organizations. Private Cloud Director allows on-premises private cloud as a service with the vital capabilities that these larger customers demand and the pedigree of being in the market for many years.
See the complete press release on Private Cloud Director on the Platform9 website. Watch the Platform9 presentations at Cloud Field Day on the Tech Field Day website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Infrastructure Matters on the road at Cloud Field Day – Infrastructure Matters, Episode 29
Platform Engineering and FinOps Converge in Kubernetes Deployments
Author Information
Alastair has made a twenty-year career out of helping people understand complex IT infrastructure and how to build solutions that fulfil business needs. Much of his career has included teaching official training courses for vendors, including HPE, VMware, and AWS. Alastair has written hundreds of analyst articles and papers exploring products and topics around on-premises infrastructure and virtualization and getting the most out of public cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Alastair has also been involved in community-driven, practitioner-led education through the vBrownBag podcast and the vBrownBag TechTalks.
