Supported Features for version 2.2.5
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
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Fully Supported |
 |
Partially Supported |
 |
Under development |
 |
Unsupported |
| Features | Support status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Installation | ||
| Install system from USB drive | |
Single image required for Master and Slave installations |
| Check system hardware | |
Physical disks and 10G links are now detected and installed properly |
| Initialise NVMe drives on the main product | |
The capability of initializing NVMe drives at runtime via the UI will be available soon. |
| Initialise NVMe drives on the Photon appliance | |
The capability of initializing NVMe drives at runtime is fully supported via the Sunlight Photon Manager Dashboard in case a photon appliance is already deployed in this cluster. |
| Initialise installation drive | |
Installation drive must appear as a SCSI compatible device (e.g. SATA or SAS) or NVMe device |
| Install to local disk | |
|
| Check Network configuration | |
Verification of NICS connectivity and proper MTU configuration |
| Configure IP settings of the dashboard | |
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| Set cluster-wide shared encryption key | |
|
| Configure internal channel mode | |
|
| Configure external VLAN mode | |
External 802.1Q VLAN switch is now compatible |
| Configure dedicated Physical NIC MAC addresses for non management traffic mode | |
|
| Upgrade support | ||
| System upgrade support followed by reboot of the cluster | |
Upgrade must currently be requested from the Sunlight support team |
| System upgrade support enabled by default | |
Coming soon |
| System upgrade support with live patching (no reboot required) | |
Coming soon |
| Infrastructure Management | ||
| Overall infrastructure stats presentation on main dashboard page | |
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| Rack/Chassis/Blade visualisation - drag and drop | |
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| Chassis placement in rack visualisation tool | |
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| Visualisation on blade and chassis positioning | |
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| Fault tolerance visualisation | |
|
| Core statistics presentation per compute node | |
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| Physical resources utilisation | |
|
| Physical memory utilisation per node | |
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| Ability to reboot nodes from the UI | |
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| Drive utilisation and datastore membership | |
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| Storage replica repair (manual UI) | |
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| Storage replica repair (CLI/API) | |
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| Automated storage repair on reboot | |
|
| Automated Storage replica repair | |
Coming soon |
| License Key management and enforcement | ||
| License system tethered to hardware | |
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| License system tethered to number of nodes | |
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| License system tethered to time period | |
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| Add/remove licences via the dashboard | |
|
| Automated addition of new Nexvisor nodes | ||
| Power on Nexvisor nodes and auto discover them via the UI | |
Requires physical installation and correct channel/encryption key settings |
| Simple install and deploy | |
|
| PXE boot auto deployment of new nodes | |
Used extensively in our internal labs, will be productised soon |
| Resource groups | ||
| Create resource groups that include individual cores, storage and network resources | |
We do not impose memory assignment restrictions on the resource group level |
| Create fault tolerance policies for VM running within those groups | |
Fault tolerance policy currently tested and supported across blades. Full support for chassis and rack fault tolerance will be released soon |
| Create metadata disk from the UI to facilitate restore of master node in the event of a failure | |
During this process template images are not restored. An action via the UI is required, in order to re-download the templates |
| Visualisation of physical resources assigned to a group | |
|
| Overcommit policy for virtual to physical core allocation | |
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| vCPU to pCPU pinning | |
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| vNUMA architecture enablement | |
Physical NUMA architecture is supported at the hypervisor level, but presenting a corresponding virtual NUMA architecture to the VM is not yet enabled |
| Software Defined Storage | ||
| Group drives together into datastores | |
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| Assign different replication policies per datastore | |
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| Concatenate volumes together into larger volume - striping | |
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| Take storage level snapshots for fast clone and backup | |
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| Move content around between physical drives | |
Requires assistance from support team |
| Achieve 1M IOPs for virtualised IO | |
Requires guest support to achieve best performance - Multiqueue block support + recent kernel. See user docs for configuration requirements |
| Physical NVMe drive hotplug removal/addition | |
|
| Virtual Disk Snapshotting | |
Create/Rename/Delete a snaphot of an existing vdisk |
| Template Creation | |
Create a Sunlight template based on a vDisk |
| Software Defined Network | ||
| Attach to physical subnet | |
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| Attach to virtual network created between VMs running across cluster | |
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| Aggregate physical network paths to create high bandwidth channel | |
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| Network path redundancy | |
Νetwork availability guarantees in the event of losing no more than 50% of the physical network paths. |
| Create VLAN networks in software and attach to switch trunk interfaces | |
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| VLAN Network Fault Tolerance | |
In case one of the available NICs attached to a VLAN virtual network fails, an alternative one will be automatically available to take over the connectivity |
| Allocate IP addresses via DHCP | |
|
| Allocate IP addresses statically | |
VMs get an IP automatically from a statically assigned block of IPs. The user can change the IP given to a specific one as a separate step via the UI. Windows users have an additional step of manually changing the network details inside the VM after changing the IP |
| Allow external DHCP service to allocate IP addresses | |
|
| MAC address passthrough for physical NICs to virtual NICs | |
Only on AWS at the moment |
| MAC address masking for passthrough NICs to support VM motion | |
Only on AWS at the moment |
| Physical NIC cable removal, link up/down | |
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| IPv6 enable | |
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| VM instances | ||
| Fully supported list of tested instances published with each release | |
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| Deploy instances from template library | |
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| Manage template library to add/remove templates from customer own on-premise private template repository | |
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| Manage template library to add/remove templates from Sunlight hosted private customer template repository | |
Self-service Template upload support provided, template deletion must be requested via support ticket |
| Create flavours to describe resource attributes for instances | |
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| Add multiple volume drives to a VM (3 supported) | |
|
| Add multiple volume drives to a VM , format accordingly and attach to any mount point | |
Must be handled by an administrator within the VM |
| Manage the extra vDisks from the UI, ephemeral vs long term standing vDisks | |
Coming soon |
| Add multiple virtual NIC interfaces to a VM | |
Is not supported for VMs booted from CD/ISO |
| Edit VM size attributes - add more vCPU, RAM, storage and network resources | |
Adding VIFs is not supported for VMs booted from CD/ISO |
| Move a VM between physical nodes in a cluster (Cold migration) | |
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| Move a VM between physical nodes in a cluster (Warm migration) | |
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| Move a VM between physical nodes in a cluster (Hot migration) | |
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| VM functionality - reboot - linux | |
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| VM functionality - reboot - windows | |
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| VM functionality - upgrade linux | |
For HVM linux VMs, the distro upgrade is not currently presented on the UI as the new distro version of the VM. |
| VM functionality - upgrade windows | |
|
| VM functionality - console access linux | |
|
| VM functionality - console access windows | |
|
| nexvisor | ||
| Reboot nexvisor | ||
| Fail over master node (automated) | |
Once the master node fails, the failover master node commences, in order to provide services by recovering the failed node |
| Single NV image to install | |
Utilized installation images limited to one |
| container and VM cluster support | ||
| Deploy VM cluster | |
|
| Deploy Docker swarm clusters, fully configured | |
We are using Ubuntu 16.04 and Docker 18.03 as our base docker enabled distribution |
| Deploy docker to different OS | |
Requires external scripts (e.g. ansible) |
| Deploy different docker version | |
Requires external scripts (e.g. ansible) |
| Manage the number of masters and slaves from the UI | |
|
| Deploy Portainer UI to manage the cluster | |
The current version of portainer installed is 1.19.2, which has been tested and is working with the current docker template version |
| Kubernetes cluster deployment support | |
We are using a third party deployment script in Ansible |
| AWS environment support | ||
| AWS floating IP assignment to VM instance vif | |
Requires Sunlight AWS dashboard |
| Application testing | ||
| MySQL | |
Manual testing as documented on the Sunlight performance portal |
| PostgreSQL | |
Manual testing as documented on the Sunlight performance portal |
| Oracle DB | |
Manual testing as documented on the Sunlight performance portal |
| Hadoop | |
Manual testing as documented on the Sunlight performance portal |
| Fio | |
|
| iperf | |
|
| External API support | ||
| Complete documentation for API support | |
|
| Complete API support for all operations | |
|
| CLI utility for non-UI based management | |
Tool exists but not exposed to system administrators yet |
| Openstack API support | |
Coming soon |
| Sunlight Tested System limits | [Note that these are not hard system limits but indicate what is validated and supported by Sunlight] | |
| Maximum supported number of VMs per NexVisor host (PV and HVM) | 40 | |
| Maximum supported number of VMs per resource group | 120 | |
| Maximum supported number of tolerated failures (blade/chassis/rack) per Resource Group FT policy | 1 | Currently we have validated the failure tolerance for the blade level |
| Maximum supported number of NexVisor hosts in a logical cluster | 8 | |
| Maximum supported physical RAM per NexVisor | 512GB | |
| Maximum supported virtual RAM per VM | 180GB | |
| Maximum supported physical cores per NexVisor | 96 | |
| Maximum supported virtual cores per VM | 32 | |
| Maximum supported vDisk size | 2TB | |
| Maximum supported physical disk size | 2TB | |
| Maximum supported NVMe drives per NexVisor | 8 | |
| Maximum supported SATA drives per NexVisor | 8 | |
| Maximum number of vDisks per VM | 3 | |
| Maximum number of vNICs per VM | 4 | |
| Maximum number of physical NICs per NexVisor | 4 | |
| Maximum number of physical NICs assigned to an encapsulated network | 4 | |
| Maximum number of VMs that can be deployed in a batch at the same time | 8 |
Master Failover Timing Measurements
The table below demonstrates how much time is needed once the master node fails, until the high available instance (which has been created there), becomes active and healthy again on failover node.
| Recovery Status on Failover node | Maximum Elapsed time |
|---|---|
| Controller active on Failover node | 1 minutes, 22 seconds |
| Controller is reachable | 1 minutes, 24 seconds |
| Database METADATA synchronization | 3 minutes, 35 seconds |
| Sunlight API becomes ready | 6 minutes, 13 seconds |
| High available VM is active and healthy on Failover node. (the reported time might vary according to the number and the size of the HA VMs to be migrated |
8 minutes, 12 seconds |