Below are a series of questions that Flexiant is typically asked and the responses that we typically give. More detailed FAQs, especially those of a technical nature, are available for review in our documentation library.

General FAQs
Existing Customers’ FAQs

What is cloud orchestration?

Cloud orchestration is the ability to manage, co-ordinate and provision all parts of a customer solution automatically, with no admin intervention, ideally from a self service interface. Much like a conductor conducts an orchestra making all the instruments/performers are in tune and in time.

Why do I need cloud orchestration?

Current non-orchestrated solutions do not meet the demands, the agility and the flexibility required by customers today. Customers are no longer prepared to wait hours, let alone days or weeks for IT solutions to be provisioned. Needing to require administration intervention to provision individual services, introduces the potential of human errors and delays. This is no longer acceptable to customers and severely limits their ability to successfully compete.

You need cloud orchestration since without it you will be unable to meet the demands of your customers and will rapidly become irrelevant in a rapidly growing and competitive market.

We are good as we are. Why do we need to consider cloud orchestration?

Traditional hosting is evolving. As companies move more and more towards moving internal IT workloads out to the cloud, the hosting industry is growing through its best growth period yet, but traditional IT architecture and deployment methodology typically employed by service providers are not flexible or agile enough to deal with customers growing requirements.

Within the next 12 months more and more companies will look towards a cloud model first, with traditional infrastructure only as a last resort. They will not stand for provisioning times in days, or contracts and services that aren’t flexible.

Cloud orchestration is the critical tool that you need to be able to respond to market demand and competitive threat and to be able to seize the opportunity to win new revenue streams.

What is the business case for Flexiant cloud orchestration?

The business case is compelling and positive – differentiate your services, secure a customer base and new revenues at higher margins and reduce your operational costs while increasing your productivity. Or risk becoming irrelevant.

What aspects of cloud orchestration do you support?

Cloud can be broken down into four main areas: PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, ITaaS. Unlike most vendors our solution, which has its heritage in making IaaS provision as fast and simple as possible, has now matured to include other critical aspects of cloud services such as application provisioning and business logic. Our view is that cloud without a high degree of automation is not really cloud, so we have fully automated the orchestration of cloud services and the associated business process from provisioning through to metering and billing. We believe that without automated metering, and certainly in the case of MSPs, without automated billing, there is no obvious reason to do this. Indeed, how could you define something as cloud without it?

How long does it take to deploy the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator software?

It typically takes around 4 hours to deploy Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator if all of the hardware and infrastructure elements are in place in the approved manner.

We love the metering and billing engine can we have that as a standalone solution?

Unfortunately this is not currently available. We have had several expressions of interest for this capability and we are looking seriously at making this available. If this is of interest to you please let us know.

Do you run on Openstack?

Not at present. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator was built long before the Openstack project, and the technology in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is far more mature and feature rich than Openstack. Indeed the software in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator was used in the launch of the first public cloud service in Europe in 2007.

At present deployment on Openstack would mean that we would have to reduce the functionality of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator since many of the capabilities that we provide to our customers are not supported by Openstack.

We do believe in open standards and open systems though, and are looking at ways to support Openstack when it becomes a viable solution.

What hardware do I require?

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator can run on a wide range of hardware of varying specifications and capacities. The hardware required depends on the size of deployment you need, and the manner of installation. You can find more information here.

Where do I go for more FAQ’s?

We maintain a register of FAQ’s in our publicly available documentation system. You can access more FAQs here.

FAQs For Existing Customers

I currently licence your Extility software. What is Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator?

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is the new name for the product previously known as Extility. As of v2.0 of our software, we are dropping Extility as a brand name, and using Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator (FCO) from now on.

What is new in the v2.0 release?

There are over a hundred new features in v2.0. Some of the more significant ones are:

• Support for multiple clusters through the same user interface
• A completely new configurable user interface
• Multiple users per account
• A group-based permissions system with fine grained permissions
• An image repository
• A new API with a powerful query language (FQL)
• Enhanced workload placement
• Support for QCOW on KVM, Xen3 and Xen4, and VMDK on all hypervisors
• Enhanced remote console service
• Support for the Xen4 hypervisor

Aside from the above, we have made a vast number of minor improvements and fixed several bugs.

How much does it cost me to upgrade my licence to v2.0?

Your existing software licence will carry forward to v2.0. This means you have access to the v2 software at no additional charge. Licences to versions of our software prior to version 1.5 are done on a hypervisor specific ‘per-instance’ basis, each instance supporting a single cluster. You may upgrade to v2.0 and provision the same number of single cluster instances using the same hypervisors as you have licensed. So, you can get an upgrade to v2.0 at no additional licence cost.

Alternatively (at your option) you may use a single instance with up to the same number of clusters as you have licensed instances, but running any hypervisor.

For instance, if you have licensed a VMware and a KVM instance from us, you have the choice of:

• A single cluster VMware instance and a single cluster KVM instance; or
• One instance, supporting two clusters, each running any supported hypervisor.

You will need to make this decision prior to the upgrade, as it affects what licence key we generate for you.

What is the upgrade process to v2.0?

When upgrading from v1.5, you have two choices: a clean install, or an upgrade.

• If you have no data on your existing system that you need to retain, the easiest route is a clean install. Simply contact our support team for a new licence key, and you can use this to install the v2.0 software yourself. We will then deactivate your existing licence key 30 days after the new platform is up and running. Alternatively, our professional services team can perform a clean install for you; this will be chargeable.
• If you do have data on your existing system that you need to retain, you will need our professional services team to do an upgrade for you. This is a chargeable activity, and the charge will depend upon the upgrade plan, which will vary from installation to installation. Please contact your sales representative for details.

No direct upgrade path is available from v1.3. v1.3 users may upgrade via an upgrade to v1.5; this upgrade is zero cost in terms of software licensing, but also requires the chargeable support of our professional services team.

For how long will you continue to develop and support v1.3 and v1.5?

Our v1.3 chain reached ‘End of Development’ state in October 2011. As of the release of v2.0, our v1.5 chain has reached ‘End of Development’ status. This means that we will not be introducing new features in these release trains.

We plan to continue to support and to issue bug-fixes for security and critical functionality issues for both v1.3 and v1.5 to existing customers until these releases reach ‘End of Support’ status. End of Support dates are set out below:

We will obviously honour any later date within your contract with us.

Can I expand my existing installation without upgrading?

Yes. You can still buy core months for your existing customers.

To what extent are v1.5 and v2.0 compatible?

Images are fully compatible provided the same hypervisor is used. The AdminAPI used is an extension of the v1.5 AdminAPI, and the v1.3 Jade AdminAPI. The user API in v2.0 is new, and provides substantial enhancements; it is not back compatible with v1.5 or v1.3.

Have the hardware requirements changed for v2.0?

All hardware which works on v1.5 will also work with v2.0.

Can I get a test version of v2.0?

Yes, download the free version from our web site.

Where can I get further information about v2.0?

You will find links to the documentation for version 2.0 at http://docs.flexiant.com/. Please contact our pre-sales technical team should you have further queries.