Windows 2012 and Windows 2016 templates are supplied by Sunlight template manager.
Start, stop, cold migrate and rebooting of windows VM are fully operational functions from both internally through the VM and externally via Sunlight dashboard/API.
The operation of 'Add/Remove Virtual Network Interface' which refers to the attachment or deletion of a virtual network interface (VIF) from the UI, is now supported for Windows Instances.
Full Windows internal upgrade support.
Reliable integrated VNC console, including Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination option.
Support for 3 extra disk block devices up to 2TB capacity each, for windows instance flavours.
Offline resize of windows VM attributes, including number of Disks, NICs, RAM and vCPUs.
Support for adding multiple NICs to a Windows VM with IPv4 address allocation through the Sunlight dashboard, using DHCP.
Improvements
No need for IP configuration of physical NIC networks assigned through external DHCP.
Improved handling of open VNC connections to a VM instance.
Improved mouse responsiveness of VNC console for windows VMs.
Improved credentials identification in the "Add template repository" option.
Added state notification messages during the lifecycle of a template repository.
In Development - targeted for an upcoming release
Accurate statistics reporting (disk IO, network IO, CPU utilisation reporting) for all instances.
Added progress indicator during the downloading process of a template.
Multi-user support with Role Based Access Control.
Striping of volumes across multiple physical NVMe drives, in order to enable larger volume capacity and enhanced single drive performance to more than 1 Million IOPs.
Increased NIC speed support to 25/50/100gbit. Revisions of supported hardware are planned throughout 2019, in order to accommodate faster NIC speeds. Sunlight will be releasing a custom 100gbit/s acceleration card aiming at significantly enhanced virtualised NIC performance.
Multi-LUN aggregation support (creating super LUNs consisting of many smaller LUNs that can span physical NVMe drives for increased capacity).
Known Issues
Simultaneous resizing of multiple VM instances is not currently supported.
Resizing of a VM, selecting a flavor which consists of the exact same resources, is not currently supported.
Support for adding multiple NICs to a VM is supported only in Windows instances.
Centos-6 hvm template image is not currently supported in this version (2.1.6).
The option 'External', referring to the DHCP type during the configuration of a virtual private network (VIF) is not currently supported.
During the upgrade phase, master and slave nodes are required to be powered down. Currently, upgrade is performed manually by the Sunlight support team.
Failover of network traffic between physical ethernet ports is not currently supported in this release. All 10 GBit ethernet ports must be connected for optimum product performance. Multi-user and RBAC are not supported in this version.
It is recommended that the maximum number of instances created in a cluster (all at once) should be limited to less or equal than 8. An issue related to large scale clusters is currently being investigated.
The implementation of separate partitions on a physical disk is not supported.
FAQs
Please use “SHIFT” instead of the “CAPS LOCK” button for capital letters, when typing the login/password of an instance through the VNC console. Using the “CAPS LOCK” button currently results in misspelled username/password.
We suggest users to create as many VM instances as the range of the IP addresses that can be provided in the network configuration. In case there are no available IP address, a newly created VM instance will fall into an error state.
In order to properly configure and access the Windows instances, it is required to execute the procedure described in the following link: Windows VM instance Configuration. Please pay particular attention to Step 4, regarding the Network configuration of the VM instance.
In the event of a manual master failover, the process of downloading and initializing the Windows image can be performed through the instance template management repository, as it is described in the following document: Create Template Repository.
In order to create a Windows VM, it is advised to choose the flavour named 'windowsFLV', which is specifically optimised with sufficient resources for the windows VM.