Beta tests of WMS and WEDOS Cloud services are over. Dozens of testers provided us with very valuable feedback that allowed us to take our services one step further. It’s taken longer than we planned, but if you’re working on a revolutionary service that’s supposed to outperform the competition, you have to expect to hit a number of snags.
The services are now ready to be launched. We have them linked to administration, billing, diagnostics, monitoring, customer and technical support. We still have a few things to finish, but these do not prevent the start of the test run.
New servers worth millions ready for WMS and WEDOS Cloud
Last week, we posted photos of 180 NVMe SSDs with a capacity of 960GB each on social media. These are HPE EL 960GB NVMe x4 MU M.2 22110XT SSDs, dedicated server drives designed for continuous operation. One stands as a gaming PC 🙂
When you order that many, they don’t send them to you in boxes anymore, they send them straight on a pallet 🙂
By the way, we’ve got more on order. 🙂
These disks are primarily intended for the new servers that will run WMS and WEDOS Cloud. However, the consumption of fast NVMe SSDs is growing. Last year we put in place a lot of measures in case of technical failure. For example, databases run in master-slave mode. Each physical server also contains a disk with a local data backup several hours old, thanks to which we can restore everything very quickly in case of emergency. This is a superior solution. We have other backups centrally.
Two HPE Moonshot server boxes will be dedicated to WMS and WEDOS Cloud from the start, each containing 45 physical servers, so we have a total capacity of 90 physical servers ready for the test run.
Each server has fully redundant 2×10 Gbps connectivity to the network. Each box with 45 servers has 2 switches and each of them has uplinks up to 4×40 Gbps.
You can put 9 such boxes in one rack, but you need decent cooling and power supply. Then you have 405!!! servers in your rack. Pretty good density, huh?
If everything goes according to plan, two more server cabinets with another 90 physical servers will be deployed after the end of the test run. We’ve got all four hooked up and ready to go.
In case of above-standard interest, which we hope for, we have more server boxes in stock, we would just have to order another palette of disks 🙂 we have a total of 16 more such boxes ready and in stock at the moment. So we have another 720 servers ready to plug in as required.
We will be installing some of them in our second datacenter, where we have received all the stamps in the past few days and we will pass the final inspection and we can start the operation. You have a lot to look forward to 🙂 .
What is HPE Moonshot and how does it work
The HPE Moonshot server enclosure contains 45 physical servers. It fits in a regular rack, it just takes up 4 and 1/3U and it’s harder to keep all the servers cool. In the DC1, we cool them with a strong stream of cool air, which we blow through the floor under pressure directly into the rack, and then very powerful fans blow the air out. The amount of air blown in is regulated by freecooling, which mixes warm air in the server room and cool air from outside. In total, we are able to “blow” gulls up to 50,000 m3 of air per hour.
Due to the design and power concentration, HPE Moonshots are ideal for oil bath cooling. In the video you can see how we tested the oil cooling prototype on the HPE Moonshot with two servers connected.
At 2:10 you can see an introduction to the HPE Moonshot solution itself.
This is a video from the end of 2016. Since then, we have made great progress with the development of oil cooling. The custom-made oil baths version 5.0 are currently being completed and will be used in our second datacenter. As soon as they deliver them to us, we’ll feature them in a separate article 🙂
HPE Moonshot is specifically designed for large cloud solutions. It contains 45 physical servers and 2 switches (2x 10 Gbps each). Fully equipped, it costs several million. We use them in a configuration with 2880 GB of DDR4 RAM. And it’s possible to have up to 720 TB of disk space on NVMe SSDs.
What does test operation mean
WMS and WEDOS Cloud are ready for deployment. All the problems found by beta testers or collogues who participated in the testing have been solved. The services are up and running and there is nothing to prevent them from being fully operational.
But as we have seen a few times over the years, some bugs only appear when the service is subjected to proper customer testing. It is important to understand that advanced services such as WMS or WEDOS Cloud are based on many technical solutions. There are still our own solutions and extensions to various open source.
We’ve encountered extremes such as hard-capped parameters in software that the creator didn’t anticipate would ever be realistically overcome, we’ve found bugs in firmware and even an improperly placed component on the motherboard that overheated and caused reboots without warning. We have a lot of experience so we know that anything can go wrong 🙂
We will therefore launch the new services in a so-called test operation. This is no different from live operation, we just can’t guarantee that there won’t be any downtime or data loss 🙂
We will continuously monitor, evaluate and collect feedback from you. Once we are sure that everything works as it should, the test operation will smoothly transition to live operation. All data and functionality will be preserved, you just pay the full but very reasonable price for the service 😉
Unlike the beta test, which was free, there is a fee for the test run. However, if there is an outage or downtime longer than 5 minutes during March, we will extend your service by one month.
We are not planning introductory pricing for the time being because there is too much interest in both services and we only have 90 physical servers dedicated to them. It seems like a lot, but you have to take into account that WMS runs on dedicated hardware. It’s similar with WEDOS Cloud.
When will we start the test run of WMS and WEDOS Cloud
The WMS is ready and has a provisional order form ready. This is not the final form. This will be simpler and include the option to buy the entire physical server. Of course, we welcome your comments and suggestions on it as well.
For WEDOS Cloud, we have launched the wedos.cz/cloud page on our website. A long list of what the service can and will do will appear. It is simply a real cloud with what the specialist community wants 🙂
As for the launch of the WEDOS Cloud test run, the last tuning focused on private networks started this week. After that, internal testing will be carried out to check whether everything corresponds to the documentation. If everything goes well, there is nothing to prevent the test run.
What else WMS and WEDOS Cloud can’t do, but will soon be able to do
Unfortunately, we were not able to complete the statistics for WMS. So you don’t yet have the opportunity to see what the dedicated physical server performance looks like in graphs and numbers. For now, you’ll only know that everything will go a lot faster 😉
For now, you cannot purchase a dedicated physical server via the order form. If you are interested, you can contact us via the form.
The option to create a dedicated WMS purely as a webserver or database server is disabled for test operation.
Furthermore, we don’t have full SSH support yet. In WMS it is and can be used for working with files. What to allow next, we are considering. This is where we could really use your feedback. My development colleagues are a bit worried about broken WMS, but we promised you such freedom that you will be able to break them 🙂
We can discuss WMS and SSH on our community site.
As for WEDOS Cloud, it is ready. The only missing payment option is hourly billing for the power consumed. For now, a flat rate payment is available.
So what can WEDOS Cloud do? 😉
- Create an “unlimited” number of virtual servers, actually virtual machines (VMs), among which you can distribute the resources you purchase.
- You can change the existing VM (CPU, RAM, disk) as you wish.
- You can allocate both physical and virtual CPU threads to a VM.
- Traffic isolation – virtual networks dedicated to individual customers
- IPV4/IPv6 (dynamically or statically allocated ranges)
- A public marketplace (datastore) with ready-made applications, a marketplace with ISO files and the possibility to add your own ISO files.
- Creating custom templates and cloning VMs.
- Automation of starting, shutting down individual services and scheduling.
- Bulk management of multiple VMs simultaneously.
- VNC console that also works on a mobile phone.
- Load statistics of individual VMs, map of the created network.
- API control (compatible with AWS EC2, EBS).
- Internal fencing (in case of VM or hardware failure, the instance is automatically started elsewhere).
- Security groups (setting and managing security rules on multiple VMs simultaneously).
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
And what will WEDOS Cloud soon be able to do?
- Private Cloud – you don’t buy resources, you buy entire physical servers that are fully available to you.
Conclusion
WEDOS Cloud and WMS are services built according to the wishes of our customers.
The WMS concept has undergone many changes over the years. We had to abandon years of development and write off considerable money invested in the service. But the result is exactly what you want from us. An extremely powerful service that is as easy to manage as our NoLimit shared web hosting. Imagine being able to buy the performance of an entire physical server with a 3.4 Ghz CPU (3.8 GHz if needed), about 60 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB NVMes SSD just for yourself. Everything is ready, just upload your favourite content management system or e-shop via our installer. By the way, this is not the highest option. You can get one physical server as a webserver and another purely for the database 🙂
The development of WEDOS Cloud took a different direction. We have tailored the service to what a small group of cloud specialists want. That’s why, for example, Terraform (Infrastructure as Code) support has been added since the last beta test. At the same time, we know what their customers want, so they can support the choice of WEDOS Cloud with our ISO certificates, for example, that everything will be in private datacentres that are in the Czech Republic, DC2 is even TIER IV Operational Sustainability certified and we are even able to offer a VIP program. Moreover, we are not new to cloud operations. Basically, several thousand VPS ONs run on the cloud, plus our other internal services are also built on cloud solutions.
We will be introducing more news soon. Both for the services mentioned above and for the new service.