Just a quick note to let everyone know about the latest
ECP 3.1 release. Among the various improvements is the addition of sparse disk support. In a nutshell sparse disk support allows you to over-commit your storage environment offering more storage than you actually have available. The advantage of sparse files is that storage is only allocated when actually needed: disk space is saved, and large files can be created even if there is insufficient free space on the file system. For example you can give a customer a 2tb storage quota, but let's say your customer only uses 3mb of actual data, than only 3mb of files are written to the disk. This means you can offer (and potentially charge for) storage you don't physically have available. It also means that sparse root images can be provisioned significantly faster, because, well you probably already guested it, less physical storage is required even for VM's that appear to have larger boot/root volumes. Yet another way we help cloud service providers make money.
Here is the release overview.
Enomaly is proud to announce the latest release of ECP Service Provider Edition. This version brings the following improvements and changes:
- VMCreator (CLI and GUI) has been updated to allow selection of Sparse or Raw disk images. This allows a choice between higher performance Raw images vs. smaller on-disk and faster provision time Sparse images.
- Increased performance and stability of disk I/O back end.
- Reduced timeouts on SSL front end.
- Many improvements to REST API calls.
- Security enhancement to GUI VMCreator. ISO Images will now need to be uploaded to server, before provisioning.
- Additional real/virtual disk usage tracking in Admin UI graphs to accommodate sparse images.
- Various security improvements to ECP application repo and core.
- Billing delegates can now be created to allow non-admin users to access metering information.
If you're an exisiting ECP customer, just run the typical YUM update.