What is Extility?

Extility is the world’s most mature and feature rich Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Computing platform.

When would I want Extility?

Extility enables and delivers solutions to a number of problems with traditional IT today.  Do you:

• Need to deliver services to customers/end users quickly
• Struggle with the ever changing requirements from customers or end users
• Want to be able to offer flexible and on-demand based services

Extility can solve all these problems and more, by enabling you to have a true IaaS service.  Extility provides a complete end to end solution, so you can get up and running very quickly.

Who uses Extility?

Anyone can – it’s that simple! For smaller service providers or SME, we recommend our Foundation Edition; for larger service providers or Enterprises we recommend our Service Provider Edition.

How do I get started with Extility?

Extility has been designed to get up and running very easily, please see our One Hour Kickstart for more information.

Can I test Extility?

Of course. We provide a fully usable downloadable version of Extility which is usable for your first 100 cores for three months.  You can download it here.

What are the benefits of Extility over traditional dedicated IT infrastructure?

First of all, there is nothing wrong with dedicated servers and there are circumstances where ‘bare metal’ is still the best solution. However, dedicated servers are lacking in flexibility. So Extility is a better bet if you are looking for:

• A solution that can provision resources instantly;
• A solution where resources can be redeployed as and when required;
• A solution that does not lock you into expensive capital investment;
• A solution that that can grow with your business as required; or
• A solution that automatically recovers from hardware failure.

In these situations Extility is most definitely the answer for you.

Can Extility fully replace existing dedicated servers?

Absolutely! Extility is capable of running any workload that you could run on existing dedicated servers, we have worked hard to ensure that although IaaS is a great leap forward, it is as easy as possible to move existing workloads over to it.  Virtual machines running on Extility appear exactly the same as a ‘bare metal’ machine.

What virtualisation technology do you use?

Extility supports KVM, Xen & VMWare VSphere. We intend to support additional hypervisors in the future, depending on customer requirements. So if you have a specific requirement, please do let us know!

Will all my applications run un-modified?

Yes! So far, we have not come across any application that would not run on top of an Extility server.

Can it support a hybrid environment (a mix of cloud and dedicated servers)?

Yes, we have built specific functionality into our networking to make it easy to integrate cloud and dedicated servers; you can even have them running on the same VLAN if required.  Extility can also be integrated into external networks to provide direct Layer 2 access from remote sites, so the possibilities are endless.

How long has Flexiant been in operation?

Flexiant spun out of XCalibre Communications Ltd in 2009, but the technology behind Extility has been in development since 2004 and in active commercial use since 2007. This makes it the longest running, most mature IaaS software in the industry. No other software currently available has the capability of Extility.

What happens if Extility detects a hardware node failing? Will it automatically re-start my virtual machine?

Extility automatically detects soft and hard failures of nodes and can restart the virtual machine automatically on a new machine, if required.  It does this without any human interaction needed and usually within one minute of detecting the failure.

How quickly can it recover from a hardware failure?

Should a physical Extility server fail (unlikely as it is), Extility will automatically restart the virtual machine within minutes.

How secure is Extility?

Extility is extremely secure. Internally, we use multiple segregated networks with firewalls for data security; powerful encryption for the storage of data and advanced password and user management to ensure customers only gain access to the resources they are allowed to.  From a customer perspective, customers can secure their network using VLANS to secure their network traffic, encryption to secure their stored data, and Affinity to ensure they are the only customer running on specific physical servers if required.  In all areas Extility has security covered.

What happens to my data when a server terminates or stops?

Extility’s storage model is persistent.  The physical servers do not store any customer data on their local disks and everything comes from a centralised storage back-end. When a server stops or even aborts, all the data is safely retained and will be fully available the next time your server boots up again.

What boot image formats does Extility support?

Extility servers will boot from any bootable image with an appropriate boot loader depending on the hypervisor that is in use on the platform. That includes ISO9660 format CDs and hard disk images for KVM/Xen & OVA files for VMWare.

What Operating Systems does Extility Support

Extility supports a wide range of Operating Systems, although overall, they are dependent on the hypervisor in use; these include:

• Windows Server 2008
• CentOS Linux 5.4
• Debian Linux 5.0
• Ubuntu Linux 9.10
• Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS
• FreeBSD

Do I have to change the OS to make it run in Extility?

There are no OS changes required to the core OS. For optimum network performance and available cloud management functions, we suggest you install some virtualisation drivers, which we supply.

What applications will Extility support?

Any applications that run on the above operating systems. If you have concerns about the suitability of Extility for a very specific type of application, please feel free to talk to our support or sales team on 0870 050 0080 or +44 1506 606 000.

What things do I need to consider if I want to build my own boot images?

All you need to remember is that you may wish to install our virtualisation drivers. We also have a ‘firstboot’ package will allow you to set the initial password.

Where can I get the source code for the drivers?

They are available from the download page here

How can I make my own images?

You can either convert a snapshot of a disk into a golden image (using the images tab on the control panel) or upload your own image.

Can you take snapshots of an existing server?

Yes. See the snapshots pane of the Control Panel. Note that if you take a snapshot whilst a server is running, the data may not be consistent because it may not all be written to disk; some may be in the server’s RAM. So if you restore from such a snapshot, the disk may not be clean (i.e. will require a fsck or chkdsk).

Such a snapshot is the same as you would get if you switched the power off without shutting down and then copied the disk. As you can imagine, restores might not work perfectly. Therefore, we suggest that you always shut the machine down before taking snapshots if you want to ensure a restore will work correctly.

Do you support Golden image cloning?

Yes, you can create an image from a snapshot using the image pane of the Control Panel.

Do you provide Golden images with fully configured LAMP or IIS setups?

We don’t directly. However, our partners offer a wide range of additional services on top of Extility, you can find out more on our Partners page.

What performance can I expect from my server?

Virtualisation typically takes a few percent of overhead for it’s own resources, but apart from that performance should be relatively the same as with a dedicated server.

How does it compare to physical hardware?

Once a Extility virtual machine is fully booted up, only somebody with a deep understanding of the underlying hardware will be able to tell that this server is actually running virtualised.

How quickly does a server boot up?

Depending on the Operating System installation, a typical boot up time is around 15-50 seconds from asking for the server to start.

What kind of hardware do you need to use to run compute nodes?

Extility can run on almost any modern server, as long as it has VT support.

Can I have multiple CPUs?

Yes you can. These virtual CPUs will be presented to the host OS as physical CPU cores.

How much memory can I have per virtual machine?

Extility is capable of supporting up to whatever the hypervisor supports.

How does the Extility charging model work?

Extility uses a unique unit based billing model. This can be specified and customised on a per billing entity basis, allowing you to offer different charging structures to different customers.

What can units be used for?

Units can be spent on four main types of service: servers, disk, network and software images. Each of these is priced in units per time period (for services such as a server running, or a disk is in use), or usage (such as data transfer or disk IO).  Time periods can be hourly, daily, monthly or yearly.

How often does the billing engine run

The Extility billing engine will debit accounts on an hourly basis.

What happens if a customer runs out of credits?

Extility has built in capabilities for warning customers (at a configurable level) of when they are running low on credits, and if you are using the Billing System integrated into the Service Provider Edition, the software can even automatically top up a customer’s account from their credit card, or by issuing them an new invoice.

What happens if a customer runs out of units?

Extility’s balance checking system runs once per hour, if it detects a customer has run out of units, it will automatically shut their virtual machines down to prevent unauthorised usage.

What happens if an automatic top-up fails?

Extility will automatically keep retrying automatic top-ups once per day.

Instead of using credit card based top-ups, would it be possible to use invoices?

Yes, Extility supports full invoice creation and management capability.

How can a customer/end user access the Extility Control Panel?

The Extility control panel is accessible via a web browser; you will recieve details of how to access it via the install process.

What does the Control Panel let a customer control?

The Control Panel provides a great deal of  functionality. Amongst other things, it allows a customer to:

• Create or delete servers;
• Start or stop a server, or kill it if it is unresponsive;
• Reconfigure a server (when it is stopped), including change its memory or CPU configuration, and the disks and network interfaces attached to it;
• Open a console session to the server through their web browser (if the server is running);
• Create, delete, or resize disks;
• Take snapshots of disks/servers, and manage their snapshots;
• Clone a snapshot onto a new disk/server;
• Make a new image from a disk/server that can be used for deployment of new servers;
• Change their firewall settings;
• Add and remove VLANs and IP addresses;
• Change their password, email address and contact details;
• View their usage and recent billing;
• Buy more units; and
• Change their credit card details.

Why can’t I change the configuration of a server whilst it is running?

Similarly, as you cannot alter the configuration of a physical server whilst it is running, the operating system you are running cannot always handle changes in hardware configuration whilst running. Therefore, you need to reconfigure the server whilst it is stopped (just like a physical server).

Is there an API to control and manage Extility?

Yes, Extility has several API’s for control at different levels of the platform.  These are discussed in more detail in the Extility Manual available from the Downloads section.

What standards does the Extility API follow?

Our API presents a SOAP/XML Web Service interface.

Does Extility provide fully static IP addresses?

Yes. All addresses used in Extility are static.

What Networking modes does Extility Support?

Extility supports the following network modes:

• Public VLANs
• Private VLANs
• Interworking VLANs
• Public Virtual IP Mode

More details on these are available in the Manual which is available from the Downloads page.

Are all the IP addresses publicly routable?

Yes, on Public VLAN or Public Virtual IP.  Private VLANs are not routable, and Interworking VLANs depend on the routing of the network outside of Extility.

Can I use multiple IPs on one server?

Yes.

Can I have multiple NICs on one server?

Yes, and they can span different networks if required.

Does data get stored on the nodes?

No. The physical servers hosting the servers do not store any customer data. All the storage is on a separate Storage System.

Can I mount the same disks on multiple servers simultaneously?

This is not possible with the standard virtual disks we provision with each virtual machine. The reasons for this are not related to Extility but rather with file system data integrity if more than one server can write to the same disk. However, if you wish to share data between servers, you can either NFS-mount between your own servers, which takes care of proper file-locking, or you can use a database infrastructure.

I am going to run out of storage space on a virtual machine, what can I do?

You can mount a second virtual disk, or you can resize your current disk. Note that you are responsible for resizing the filing system within the virtual disk (resize2fs under Linux).

Can I shrink the size of a virtual disk?

No. Your operating system would be unlikely to support it anyway. If you need to do this, create a new smaller disk and copy the data over.

What support options do you provide for Extility?

These depend on which edition of Extility you have, please see the Features & Editions page for more information.