The Allure and Challenges of Private Clouds

Virtualization has become a cornerstone for businesses of all sizes, delivering greater efficiency, flexibility, and cost savings by enabling multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server. When considering virtualization, organizations face a critical decision: opting for a public cloud or building their own private cloud.

Public clouds, like AWS, Azure, and GCP, offer convenience and scalability but can be expensive, particularly for resource-intensive workloads.
Private clouds, on the other hand, provide greater control over data and security but come with the complexities of building and managing the underlying infrastructure.

Within virtualization, there’s another crucial choice: system virtualization versus containers:

System virtualization creates virtual machines (VMs), each with its own operating system, providing strong isolation but also requiring significant resources.
Containers share the host operating system kernel, offering a lightweight and portable solution suitable for microservices-based applications.

The recent acquisition of VMware, the dominant system virtualization solution, by Broadcom has sent ripples through the virtualization industry. Concerns about potential price hikes and shifts in strategic direction have led many organizations to explore alternative private cloud solutions.

Platform9: Your Private Cloud Solution

Platform9 Private Cloud Director (PCD) emerges as a compelling solution for organizations seeking to build and manage their own private clouds. Built upon open-source technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes, Platform9 simplifies the complexities of private cloud deployment and management.

The Architecture of Platform9 Private Cloud Director

Private Cloud Director’s architecture consists of three key components:

The Operations Plane: Available only for SaaS-managed deployments, this component collects logs, metrics, and alerts, enabling Platform9 to proactively monitor and manage the customer’s infrastructure. Organizations deploying PCD on-premises must integrate metrics collection and analysis with their existing toolsets such as Splunk or their SIEM for security considerations.
The Management Plane: Hosted either by Platform9 (SaaS) or self-hosted in the customer’s data center, this component houses core services like authentication and authorization, APIs, database, message queue, UI, and load balancers.
The Servers: These represent the physical or virtual servers within the customer’s environment that are onboarded into PCD.

Inside Private Cloud Director, VMs are running on the KVM hypervisor, which is integrated alongside Kubernetes in an OpenStack environment.

Features and Benefits of Platform9

Platform9 offers a rich set of features designed to empower organizations with a robust and user-friendly private cloud experience:

Simplified Onboarding: PCD deploys A lightweight agent to each server, allowing easy onboarding through the UI or API. You can designate servers for hypervisor, image storage, network traffic, or other roles.
Multi-Tenancy and Self-Service: Enables the creation of multiple isolated tenants with configurable quotas for compute, storage, and network resources. Supports integration with external identity providers for single sign-on (SSO).
VM Management: Offers a user-friendly UI for deploying, managing, and migrating VMs. Supports live and cold migrations with minimal downtime. Includes VM HA and resource rebalancing features akin to VMware’s DRS, ensuring high availability and efficient resource utilization.
Image and Storage Management: Provides a catalog of pre-uploaded golden images and allows administrators to upload custom images. Supports diverse storage backends, including NFS, iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and Ceph.
Kubernetes Integration: Enables the creation and management of Kubernetes clusters on top of the virtualized infrastructure. Platform9 handles the underlying VM creation, networking, and load balancing, simplifying Kubernetes deployments.
Proactive Operations: For SAS-managed deployments, Platform9 proactively monitors the environment, identifies potential issues, and often resolves them before they impact the customer. This proactive approach reduces support tickets and ensures a smooth operational experience.

Migrating from VMware to Platform9

Platform9 recognizes the challenge of migrating from existing virtualization environments, as organizations have to manage:

Scale: many thousands of VMs
OS: multiple versions of Linux or Windows
Virtualization changes: ESX to KVM
Drivers: Paravirtual, storage, network devices
Type of migration: cold, warm, or hot migration
Network mapping: different virtual networks on source and destination
Complexity: Multiple NICs and disks, advanced tooling such as Terraform and ansible

To alleviate these challenges, Platform 9 has developed a dedicated open-source tool, vJailbreak, to facilitate seamless migration from VMware to Platform9.

vJailbreak addresses key migration complexities:

Data Migration: Efficiently copies and converts VMDK disks from VMware to a raw format used by Platform9. Supports both live and cold migrations, minimizing downtime based on data volume and application requirements.
Network Configuration: Persists MAC addresses and IPs of migrated VMs, ensuring continuity of services. Requires pre-configured networks on the Platform9 side to match existing VMware network configurations.
Driver Compatibility: Handles the update of drivers and removal of VMware Tools, ensuring seamless operation of migrated VMs on the Platform9 platform.

Shortcomings

While Platform9 offers a compelling alternative to VMware, some potential shortcomings warrant consideration:

Limited Operational Plane for Self-Hosted Deployments: While SAS customers benefit from Platform9’s proactive monitoring and management, self-hosted customers must integrate their own log aggregation and monitoring tools. This requires additional effort and expertise from the customer’s side.
Security Considerations: Security policies on Platform9 Kubernetes clusters need customization based on the customer’s requirements. While default configurations are provided, ensuring robust security necessitates a thorough understanding of Kubernetes security best practices and potential vulnerabilities.
Lack of Integrated HCI Solution: Platform9 does not offer an integrated hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution similar to VMware vSAN. Customers with existing HCI investments may need to adapt their infrastructure to utilize Platform9’s storage backend.

Why This Matters

In the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, organizations are increasingly seeking flexible, cost-effective, and robust private cloud solutions that offer greater control and customization. Platform9 is a compelling alternative that addresses many of the traditional pain points associated with private cloud deployment and management.

While the solution is not without its challenges—such as the need for self-hosted customers to integrate their own monitoring tools and carefully configure security settings—Platform9 offers a remarkably comprehensive approach to private cloud infrastructure. Its strengths are particularly evident in its flexible architecture, robust migration tools like vJailbreak, and seamless integration of system virtualization and container technologies.

The key reasons to investigate Platform9 more thoroughly include:

Flexibility and Open-Source Foundation: Built on open-source technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes, Platform9 provides organizations with unprecedented flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in. This approach allows for customization and future-proofing of your cloud infrastructure.
Simplified Management: The platform dramatically reduces the complexity of private cloud deployment, offering intuitive onboarding, multi-tenancy support, and comprehensive VM management capabilities that rival traditional solutions like VMware.
Migration Capabilities: With the vJailbreak tool, Platform9 demonstrates a deep understanding of the challenges organizations face when transitioning between virtualization platforms, providing a thoughtful and technically sophisticated migration path.
Hybrid Cloud Readiness: The solution’s architecture supports both SaaS-managed and self-hosted deployments, giving organizations the flexibility to choose an approach that best fits their operational model and security requirements.

For IT leaders and infrastructure architects grappling with the evolving virtualization landscape, Platform9 represents more than just an alternative—it’s a strategic opportunity to reimagine private cloud infrastructure. The platform’s approach suggests a future where cloud management is more accessible, flexible, and aligned with modern technological needs.

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Jack Poller

Principal Analyst Jack Poller uses his 30+ years of industry experience across a broad range of security, systems, storage, networking, and cloud-based solutions to help marketing and management leaders develop winning strategies in highly competitive markets. Prior to founding Paradigm Technica, Jack worked as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group covering identity security, identity and access management, and data security. Previously, Jack led marketing for pre-revenue and early-stage storage, networking, and SaaS startups. Jack was recognized in the ARchitect Power 100 ranking of analysts with the most sustained buzz in the industry, and has appeared in CSO, AIthority, Dark Reading, SC, Data Breach Today, TechRegister, and HelpNet Security, among others.
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