Racked today, entire hosting solution based on Vates stack

[olivierlambert]

Obviously, you need some fun otherwise it would be boring

[nikade]

@olivierlambert said in Racked today, entire hosting solution based on Vates stack:

Obviously, you need some fun otherwise it would be boring

Haha yeah "fun"

[nikade]

@Pilow well you seem to have a nice setup, I am looking forward to more pictures!
I wish I could share ours, but im not allowed to

[Pilow]

@nikade will share some automation screenshots of our current developments as soon as they are proofed
we're building on top of APIs, all custom settings

[nikade]

@Pilow sounds good, i'll follow this thread!

[Pilow]

@nikade still early dev but here is what is actually working

• defining a tenant VLAN, ip subnet is calculated with vlan
• creating interfaces & VIP carp in netgate 8300 max cluster
• creating bandwith limiters & default rules for the tenant
• adding vlan to the switches clusters
• creating the XCP networks on production pool in xoa
• pushing documentation of new tenant to netbox

4 clicks !

work in progress : dhcp server/openvpn server by tenant, outbound nat dedicated IP of available pool per tenant

and XO like interface for resellers to manage their clients (this is a global admin view, all internal, clients, and resellers available)
pushing VMs in their reserved vlan
start/stopping vms
view only on their backup logs (not possible with XOA ACLs/self service resources without being an admin)
reseller can manage its own tenant and its clients tenants, firewall rules are made so that the reseller can access all its client tenants (if he wants to put up its own monitoring for exemple, or mutualised services for its clients)

work in progress : replicate XOA self-service like options, but with custom granularity. VMs deployement with pulumi is quite finished, need to better manage the available templates to each client/reseller
their will be a global admin view for us, reseller view for reseller tenant+its clients tenants, and client view on its own tenant

spinning up a tenant with zero-to-ping in less than 5 minutes is the goal !

[nikade]

@Pilow thats very impressive, you've done some really great work here.
I like the "private cloud" approach where you can have re-sellers under their own umbrella, but on your infrastructure.

Do you already have customers on another platform or why did you decide to make this big investment with time, hardware, colocation, fiber and all that is needed for this kind of project?

[Pilow]

@nikade we had a similar setup on VMWARE solution, OVH bare metal hosted in France.

but you know. broadcom

main company is Toolbox, we decided to migrate onprem and cloud clients to full Vates locally hosted on the island this time, and separated the hosting in Cloudbox, a sister company of Toolbox.

many clients do not want to be hosted externaly of the island because of the latency. 250ms to 10ms is quite an upgrade for some situations.

and disaster recovery for 10Tb of vm infrastructure from OVH to Reunion gets you a high RTO, many clients had their external backups on our OVH servers. from days to hours now if needed.

[nikade]

@Pilow yeah I know, we're a vmware customer as well and the pricing increase was pretty rough.

I can imagine this is a big upgrade for your company, and it seems like you already have the customers so this will probably be a very nice upgrade for them.
I can also guess, that you were able to completely rebuild everything now exactly how you wanted it, which is also a big plus.

[Pilow]

@nikade the customer base is just below what we need to zeroe the costs... need to have good communication and sell the new infrastructure now, it's a challenge

rebuikld, yes, and even get more with automation because of Vates stack it's easier to pull up things. i'm a big fan.

other challenge is to convert the actual vmware vms.
our current V2V path consists of veeam backup from old datacenter to new datacenter to veeam cloud connect repository. then we have nested ESXi in XCP pool to restore, and import from there

we had veeam replication possibilities with vmware, still need to get that in place with XO proxies and XO backup to replicate from on-prem clients to our datacenters

perhaps when veeam will be out of beta, we could have replication plans like we had on vmware ?

as soon as our hosting stack is done we'll need beta testers, if you're up to help us test the automations

[nikade]

@Pilow sure, I can help you test some of the automations. What would you need done? Just "act" as a customer and setup some VM's and such?

[Pilow]

@nikade yup. break it with normal usage and try to abuse it before its on production mode.
having feedbacks on what is working, and what is not would be valuable for us... totally pro bono though

bonus for you, you could spawn VMs in the indian ocean ^^'

more seriously if you're into it, we need some experimented XCPNG users to test it before launching the tests to totally non-experimented users too.

the app is quite not ready for open beta, still in alpha I guess, but i'll tell you asap.

[nikade]

@Pilow Sounds like a solid, let me know when you're ready. I can spawn some VM's and use the webinterface and "try" to break it

[Davidj 0]

@Pilow Sounds fun, let me know if you want someone else to test!

[Pilow]

@Davidj-0 i'll ping back here whenever the app is ready to be tested
will be MS O365 auth to access

[Pilow]

some screenshot updates of where we're at

Deploy of a new VM

check of VM replica/DR

snapshots management

check of backup logs

first beta coming soon

[nikade]

Looks good!
I can't overlook the fact that it is in french, I guess "others" will have english in their UI?

[Pilow]

@nikade haha translation is not on the checklist for now as it is more an internal project of CBX
but we could see a future where this becomes a standalone add-on for MSPs based on Vates stack that want to manage multi tenants

time will tell, first (baby)steps is to get something working as intented.

[Pilow]

latest update, console tab is finally working

without this annoying bug we had on XOA (@ or / character needs you to refresh console page otherwise you can't type anymore in the console)

[bvitnik]

@Pilow I'm not so impressed with the hardware stack ... but this Cloudbox GUI is much more interesting. Is this something you developed from scratch in house for VMware and that ported to XO or...?