Moving to a new era: full-stack solution on top of bare metal

By: Greg Dietrich, Solution Architect – HiveIO Inc.

We continue to see significant interest in Hive Fabric, particularly in delivering the public cloud experience on-premises. Our solution fits seamlessly into any VDI/VSI environment. How does Hive Fabric provide the same functionality, and often more, than other VSI/VDI solutions? It’s important to note that Hive Fabric operates primarily as a full-stack VDI or VSI solution, directly on bare metal. Let’s take a few minutes to outline some of the basic functionality included in the Hive Fabric platform.

Flexible Storage Architectures for Hive Fabric VDI/VSI

Hive Fabric provides a highly flexible platform. It enhances both VDI and VSI environments. The basic bare metal installation gives you the platform to run workloads on one of several different architectures:

  • In-Memory Storage: A Hive Fabric appliance can carve out memory to provide storage for any targeted workload. During guest pool creation, you can select RAM as the storage target. Consequently, you continue to benefit from the extreme performance of delivering VDI from RAM with Hive Fabric.
  • Local Disk Storage: Using local SSD to run your workloads offers a good balance between cost and performance. One key difference from other solutions is that Hive Fabric allows live migration, even when using local storage.
  • Shared Storage: Hive Fabric can also deliver shared storage. It uses local disks from across multiple hosts to build a resilient shared storage platform. This is ideal for virtualization. Simply press the “Enable Shared Storage” button in your Hive Fabric cluster. We will then pool the storage into a single storage target, available to all hosts in the cluster.
  • Block Storage: Hive Fabric delivers block storage using either iSCSI or Fiber Channel presented storage volumes. This allows customers to leverage Storage Area Network (SAN) platforms, rounding out the supported storage technologies.

All the storage architectures mentioned here are native to our Hive Fabric platform. No virtual appliances are required to provide features like storage presentation, IO acceleration, deduplication, or compression. This inherent integration boosts Hive Fabric VDI/VSI performance.

Comprehensive Management Features in Hive Fabric

In addition to optimized storage platforms, Hive Fabric also includes features that allow for complete platform management:

  • Cluster Resource Scheduler (CRS): CRS ensures that guests running on Hive Fabric are managed efficiently. They get the resources they need to run. It also balances resource utilization across the platform.
  • Broker: When enabled, Hive Fabric operates its own guest broker as part of the overall solution. This allows any cluster host to provide access to any guest within the cluster. Furthermore, it provides end-users with a simple interface to log in and access their desktop.
  • Dashboard: The Hive Fabric dashboard consolidates cluster orchestration into a single UI. It includes features for host hardware monitoring, guest management, and an API/Message Bus browser. This makes managing your Hive Fabric VDI/VSI environment intuitive.

Hive Fabric™ Optimized VDI / VSI Environment

Hive Fabric: The Full-Stack Solution for VDI/VSI Optimization

The Hive Fabric platform is a full-stack replacement for traditional Hypervisor, SDS, and VDI architectures of the past. Optimizing your platform under a single vendor brings simplicity and operational efficiencies. It also extends into significant cost savings. These come from single-vendor licensing, streamlined administration efforts, and the removal of management layer bloat. All these elements are collapsed into Hive Fabric.

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