Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has been designed to get up and running very easily, please see our Installing Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator guide for more information.
If you would like to evaluate Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, please contact our sales department here: https://www.flexiant.com/contact/.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator supports KVM, Xen, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, and Virtuozzo (formerly PCS).
Yes! So far, we have not come across any application that would not run on top on Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator.
Yes, we have built specific functionality into our networking to make it easy to integrate cloud and physical servers; you can even have them running on the same layer 2 VLAN if required using Interworking VLANs. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator can also be integrated into external networks to provide direct Layer 2 access from remote sites, so the possibilities are endless.
Flexiant spun out of XCalibre Communications Ltd in 2009, but the technology behind Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has been in development since 2004 and in active commercial use since 2007. This makes it the longest running, most mature Cloud Orchestration solution in the industry.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator automatically detects soft and hard failures of nodes and can recover the virtual machine automatically on a new physical server, if required. It begins the recovery process without any human interaction needed and usually within minutes of detecting the failure.
Should a physical Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator server fail, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator will automatically restart the virtual machine within minutes, moving it to one of the other physical servers within your platform.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is extremely secure. Internally, we use multiple segregated networks with firewalls for data security; powerful encryption for the storage of data and advanced password and user management to ensure customers only gain access to the resources they are allowed to. From a customer perspective, customers can secure their network using VLANs to secure their network traffic, encryption to secure their stored data, and Dynamic Workload Placement to ensure they are the only customer running on specific physical servers if required. In all areas Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has security covered. For more information about Dynamic Workload Placement, see How the Dynamic Workload Placement System Works.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s storage model is persistent. The physical servers do not store any customer data on their local disks and everything comes from a centralised storage back-end (except where local storage is configured). When a server stops or even aborts, all the data is safely retained and will be fully available the next time your server boots up again.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator servers will boot from any bootable image with an appropriate boot loader depending on the hypervisor that is in use on the platform. That includes ISO9660 format CDs and hard disk images for KVM/Xen & OVA files for VMware.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator supports a wide range of Operating Systems, although overall, they are dependent on the hypervisor in use; options include:
There are no OS changes required to the core OS. For optimum network performance and available cloud management functions, depending on the hypervisor and operating system some virtualisation drivers may be required, which we supply.
Any applications that run on the above operating systems. If you have concerns about the suitability of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator for a very specific type of application, please feel free to talk to our support or sales team on 0870 050 0080 or +44 1506 606 000.
All you need to remember is that you may wish to install our virtualisation drivers. We also have a firstboot package will allow you to set the initial password. Full details on how to build images is available from Building an Image.
You can either convert a snapshot of a disk into a image (using the image widget on the control panel) or upload your own image the same way.
Yes. For information on how to do this, see Creating a Snapshot. Note that if you take a snapshot whilst a server is running, the data may not be consistent because it may not all be written to disk; some may be in the server’s RAM. So if you restore from such a snapshot, the disk may not be clean (i.e. will require a fsck or chkdsk).
Such a snapshot is the same as you would get if you switched the power off without shutting down and then copied the disk. As you can imagine, restores might not work perfectly. Therefore, we suggest that you always shut the machine down before taking snapshots if you want to ensure a restore will work correctly.
Yes, you can create an image from a snapshot using the Image Widget of the Control Panel.
We don't directly. However, our partners offer a wide range of additional images and services on top of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. You can find out more on our Partners page.
Virtualisation typically takes a few percent of overhead for its own resources, but apart from that performance should be relatively the same as with a dedicated server.
Once a Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator virtual machine is fully booted up, only somebody with a deep understanding of the underlying hardware will be able to tell that this server is actually running virtualised.
Depending on the Operating System installation and Hypervisor, a typical boot up time is around 10-50 seconds from asking for the server to start.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator can run on almost any modern server, as long as it has VT support.
Yes you can. These virtual CPUs will be presented to the host OS as physical CPU cores.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator places no limitation on the amount of memory a virtual machine can use; the only restriction is the maximum amount of memory that your chosen hypervisor specifies that a VM can use.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator uses a unique unit based billing model. This can be specified and customised on a per billing entity basis, allowing you to offer different charging structures to different customers.
Units can be spent on four main types of service: servers, disk, network and software images. Each of these is priced in units per time period (for services such as a server running, or a disk is in use), or usage (such as data transfer or disk IO). Time periods can be hourly, daily, monthly or yearly.
The Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator billing engine runs every 15 minutes, though this is configurable. For more information, see Configuration Customisations.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has built in capabilities for warning customers (at a configurable level) of when they are running low on credits, and if you are using the billing system the software can even automatically top up a customer's account from their credit card, or by issuing them an new invoice.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator's balance checking system runs once per hour by default, if it detects a customer has run out of units, it will automatically shut their virtual machines down to prevent unauthorised usage.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator will automatically keep retrying automatic top-ups once per day.
Yes, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator supports full invoice creation and management capability. It also supports integration into existing external billing solutions.
The Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator control panel is accessible via a web browser; you will receive details of how to access it via the install process.
The control panel provides a great deal of functionality. Amongst other things, it allows a customer to:
Yes, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has several APIs for control at different levels of the platform. These are discussed in more detail in the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Developer Guide.
Our API presents a SOAP/XML Web Service interface. A REST API is also available.
Yes. All addresses used in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator are static.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator supports the following network modes:
Yes.
Yes, and they can span different networks if required.
This is not possible with the standard virtual disks we provision with each virtual machine. The reasons for this are not related to Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator but rather with file system data integrity if more than one server can write to the same disk. However, if you wish to share data between servers, you can use a shared file system such as NFSv4.
You can mount a second virtual disk, or you can resize your current disk. Note that you are responsible for resizing the filing system within the virtual disk (resize2fs on Linux).
No. Your operating system would be unlikely to support it anyway. If you need to do this, create a new smaller disk and copy the data over.
These depend on which edition of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator you have, please see our website.