A Painless Shift to Virtualization

FUNCTIONING IN AN ENVIRONMENT OF INCREASING COMPLEXITY

Businesses around the world are becoming widely more dynamic, and communication needs are requiring more and more personalized services and tailor-made solutions, Ooma’s effort to meet their customers’ demands is intensifying. Yet, along with the flexibility and customized product offerings that they deliver comes increased complexity—both to the telecommunication solutions that they provide, as well as to their underlying infrastructure.

One of the key efforts that Ooma has had to address from a platform perspective is being able to manage that growing complexity, not only in the solutions that they provide, but also in managing their underlying infrastructure.

With an increasing shift from bare metal servers to VMs in their environment, Ooma needed to figure out a way to improve their overall resource management. Some of their requirements of increasing importance included gaining the ability to have a centralized view into the utilization of VM hosts across the enterprise, and being provided a simple way to migrate VMs from one host to another. Additionally, the exercise of provisioning new VMs was becoming much more labor-intensive and time consuming. And this is where OpenNebula has proven its value.

LETTING OPENNEBULA DO THE HEAVY LIFTING

Figuring out how to evenly distribute VMs across multiple hosts was becoming a challenge for Ooma, as they lacked a centralized dashboard to provide insight into the resource utilization across VMs. And OpenNebula has been able to completely resolve that issue with its simple, and easy-to-use Sunstone GUI. “And provisioning is also easier for that same reason, now since most of the time we let OpenNebula do the heavy lifting and automatically choose the best VM host on which to provision,” states Gill.

Ooma is currently running four separate OpenNebula instances in datacenters across the US, with about 70 hosts and close to 500 VMs, and as their infrastructure grows, the proven scalability of OpenNebula provides solid reassurance for them as they look to the future.

“Not only is OpenNebula scalability a key factor for us, but it being an open source solution has provided us an extra layer of flexibility.”

Anoop Gill, System Administrator

As an open source software, Ooma was able to determine very quickly and easily whether it was the right solution for them. With a simple download of the software, they were able to test it out, evaluate it, and get it up and running with hardly any barriers. And now, as an OpenNebula customer, they have official OpenNebula support and a solid working relationship with the OpenNebula Systems experts, to make sure that they are getting the best out of their software solution, as they seek to provide an efficient and simple solution for their business.