From basic functionality to a mature world-class product — the evolution of VMmanager

      The VMmanager virtualization management platform not only meets basic business needs for virtual infrastructure, but also implements complex enterprise scenarios demanded by large commercial players and the public sector. IT-World describes what updates the platform received over the past year, which key innovations have allowed it to win the trust of major customers, and what awaits VMmanager in the future.

      Choosing a virtualization platform through the customer's eyes

      Against the backdrop of active import substitution, the Russian market for virtualization platforms has faced the need not just to replace departed products, but to offer businesses reliable and secure long-term solutions. After all, when a customer chooses a particular product they make a strategic decision that determines the scalability, flexibility and security of corporate IT infrastructure for years to come. It is in this context that understanding fundamental differences in development approaches becomes particularly important.

      A significant portion of current products in this class are developed on the basis of existing open-source solutions — a common and perfectly workable strategy both for the developer company and for the direct customer.

      Nevertheless, it must be understood that solutions developed in-house from scratch have a number of advantages. For example, VMmanager has been evolving for more than 15 years. Undoubtedly, this development approach not only provides customers with a mature product, but also allows full control over the solution’s codebase, enabling regular releases of operational and functional updates to certified product versions that are relevant for large businesses. By contrast, using open components, despite their apparent simplicity and speed of deployment, carries hidden risks. Each new third-party update is released with unpredictable quality, stability and security.

      In contrast, in-house development makes it possible to promptly and precisely close vulnerabilities, introduce improvements and fixes, and quickly release certified product versions. For domestic enterprises that in recent years have faced a barrage of cyberattacks, such predictability and control over infrastructure become a key factor in their choice.

      The product’s market appeal is multiplied by its deep integration into the Astra Group ecosystem. By choosing VMmanager, a customer receives not only a convenient tool for centralized virtualization management, but also the ability to rapidly integrate with related solutions — the DCImanager physical infrastructure management platform, the BILLmanager infrastructure automation platform, the RuBackup backup system, the Termidesk VDI solution, and, most importantly, Astra Linux Special Edition, which conforms to the documents: Trust Requirements(1), OS Requirements, OS Protection Profile (A of the first protection class. IT.OS.A1.PZ), Requirements for Containerization Tools(1), Requirements for DBMS(1), Requirements for Virtualization Tools(1).

      In addition, the VMmanager platform itself meets the information security requirements of the FSTEC of Russia at the 4th level of trust and the 4th protection class for virtualization tools. Compliance with these requirements allows VMmanager to be used for processing and protecting information in state information systems up to and including protection class 1, in automated control systems for production and technological processes up to and including protection class 1, in personal data information systems up to and including protection level 1, and in significant objects of critical information infrastructure up to and including category 1.

      The platform’s active expansion of functional capabilities has radically changed customer perceptions of the product. If a few years ago clients actively voiced their wishes for additional features, today, according to customers’ assessments, the platform covers 98% of the needs of any IT infrastructure.

      Key innovations — functionality for complex infrastructure

      The past year for VMmanager was a period of targeted development toward meeting corporate IT infrastructure needs. The platform was enriched with a number of functional capabilities that elevate it to a solution for the complex tasks of a modern data center.

      One of the most demanded innovations was the ability to migrate a server to a virtual machine. Traditionally, a virtualization management system requires a separate physical server, which leads to additional costs and complicates redundancy. The new model allows the VMmanager platform itself to be deployed as a virtual machine inside the cluster it manages. This not only reduces hardware costs but also dramatically increases the fault tolerance of the entire management system. In upcoming releases this function will be supplemented by the ability to install on a single node, which will broaden the range of applicable scenarios.

      In response to growing demand in AI, big data analytics and other resource-intensive tasks, deep work was done on graphics accelerators. Today VMmanager implements GPU passthrough technology, providing direct attachment of a physical GPU to a virtual machine. This minimizes performance loss, giving VMs unhindered access to hardware resources. It is also worth noting the platform’s support for the Hosting version of GPU virtualization technology — vGPU. Support for vGPU technology will be available in the Infrastructure edition, simultaneously with the announced support for Astra Linux 1.8.3.

      For large companies with distributed structures, access management tools are critically important. The new role-based model in VMmanager allows administrators not to be limited to standard roles but to create custom roles with fine-grained privilege settings tailored to specific business processes. Also, starting in October, VMmanager customers will be able to configure synchronization with multiple LDAP directories simultaneously, which will simplify integration of the platform into a heterogeneous IT environment and allow centralized management of access for users from different sources.

      Another significant step was full support for hyperconverged configurations. This approach, which combines compute resources and storage on the same hardware, enables customers to build more efficient and cost-effective solutions, simplifying not only management but also infrastructure scaling.

      The evolution of VMmanager’s functionality has naturally led to a change in the target customer profile. Today interest in the platform is increasingly shown by large companies and government organizations, which is accompanied by deeper market engagement. Large clients and customers from the public sector are interested not only in the presence of a particular feature but in the depth of its development, reliability in production operations, and the possibility, based on pilot project results, to refine or adjust the desired functionality.

      Such clients’ pragmatic approach to using different product versions is telling. It is not uncommon for the same organization to purchase both the certified FSTEC version and the regular one. The protected version is deployed for work with restricted-access information, government systems or personal data, while the regular edition is used for less critical tasks.

      Large and rapidly growing customers will also find tools to meet their needs. Typically, the IT infrastructure of such enterprises comprises several virtualization platforms from the start — for reasons of risk diversification or economic efficiency. The answer to such clients’ requests was a ready-made VMmanager + BILLmanager bundle. The integrated solution allows management of a heterogeneous environment — including different virtualization platforms, physical servers and even clouds — from a single interface, enabling smooth, painless migration without hasty abandonment of existing solutions. Implementing two platforms at once provides automation of management processes, full cost control and self-service capabilities for business units. At the same time, large customers need not fear high loads — VMmanager’s architecture is built for high scalability. In practice the platform successfully withstood a peak load of 120,000 virtual machines on a single node; however, guaranteed stability is ensured for operation up to 65,000 VMs. For an optimal balance of performance and reliability, the company recommends hosting up to 25,000 virtual machines on a single physical server.

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      From virtualization to cloud services

      Over the past year of active development, VMmanager has not only gained functionality but also confirmed its relevance for the most demanding market segments. If today VMmanager is confidently positioned as a solution for server virtualization of any scale, its strategic development vector will now be extended toward cloud technologies.

      Planned in the near term is the implementation of highly requested cloud features. In particular, this concerns the ability to migrate virtual machines between multiple VMmanager instances, and in the longer term — the creation of a sort of “federation” of platforms where several systems can operate as a single whole. A logical continuation of this path will be the development of a multi-tenant access model for the platform, allowing isolated provisioning of resources to different departments or clients within a shared infrastructure.

      At the same time, promising ecosystem developments such as software-defined networking are being implemented. SDN integration ensures that in the future VMmanager will be able to offer customers a full-fledged cloud platform with advanced functional capabilities.

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