FAQ
FAQs
- What is Nimbula Director?
- How can I sign up for a trial?
- What do I need to start evaluating Nimbula Director?
- What is Nimbula Director’s pricing structure?
- How does Nimbula Director tackle the issue of federation and interoperability between private and public clouds?
- How scalable is Nimbula Director?
- What is Nimbula’s target market?
What is Nimbula Director?
Nimbula Director, Nimbula’s flagship product, is a software solution that helps enterprises and service providers to build private, public or hybrid clouds. It allows enterprises to offer Amazon EC2-like services to their internal users, and allows service providers to build their own public cloud offerings.
How can I sign up for a trial?
Nimbula Director is available for download at nimbula.com after completing a short registration form. For deployment on infrastructure up to 40 cores Nimbula Director is licenced free of charge. For your evaluation, we recommend you follow the steps in the Evaluator's Guide. If you’re interested in more details, contact us at sales@nimbula.com.
What do I need to start evaluating Nimbula Director?
Please download the latest version of Nimbula Director from https://nimbula.com/secure/products/downloads/
Your next steps:
- Burn the ISO image to an DVD
- Allocate three X86 servers with 64bit and VT capable CPUs, at least 4GB of RAM, and 100GB of disk space. See the checklist here: http://nimbula.com/forum/topic/1/
- Link the 3 servers to an isolated network segment or VLAN (network traffic routed to default gateway, we set up our own DHCP and PXE servers)
- Start the installation process by booting the live DVD on one of the 3 X86 hosts or a seed node, which can be a laptop on the same Ethernet segment as the 3 hosts.
- Determine network site information (see the Installation Checklist http://nimbula.com/forum/topic/1/)
- Start the install process as described in "Step 3. Start the Nimbula Director Infrastructure Controller" of the Install and Administration Guide, power on servers in the sequence prompted by the CD installer. We also have a video of the installation process: watch video.
- Finish the installation by downloading the activation key from the Nimbula website
The Nimbula Director install process itself should take an hour or two. The next step is to work through the steps in the Evaluator's Guide which will take you through all of Nimbula Director's features.
What is Nimbula Director’s pricing structure?
For deployment on infrastructure of up to 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licenced free of charge (fully-featured). For deployments on more than 40 cores, please contact us at sales@nimbula.com.
How does Nimbula Director tackle the issue of federation and interoperability between private and public clouds?
With Nimbula Director, customers can use a common API to run workloads in local or external private or public clouds like Amazon EC2, facilitating seamless interoperability. Access to external sites is subject to Nimbula Director’s fine-grained authorization policy, providing tight control of resource consumption across heterogeneous cloud platforms via the common API.
How scalable is Nimbula Director?
Nimbula Director has been designed from the ground up to easily scale up to thousands of nodes. The cloud management is highly automated, and new hardware added to the network is automatically discovered, configured and installed. Advanced networking, including distributed a NAT service and security groups, supports the highly scalable cloud architecture.
What is Nimbula’s target market?
Nimbula targets enterprises who wish to build a cloud environment within their own datacenter and offer their internal customers Amazon EC2-like capabilities behind the firewall, as well as service providers who wish to build Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings similar to Amazon AWS.
Nimbula also provides consulting services to help businesses maximize value from cloud computing. We offer evaluation, design and implementation services to help businesses get started with cloud computing.
