How Serverspace became the #1 provider thanks to the vStack platform

International cloud provider Serverspace operates in seven countries with more than 5,000 customers. The company uses VMware solution and vStack hyperconverged platform as virtualization systems. It is thanks to the implementation of the vStack solution that the provider topped the top companies in terms of virtual machine performance. In this article we will tell you how Serverspace reduced the time to create VMs, increased their performance and reduced virtualization costs.

Serverspace is an international company

Serverspace has been operating on the cloud services market for more than 14 years. During this time, it has opened representative offices in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, as well as in the CIS and Asia. The company has data centers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and the USA. In its work, the provider takes into account the needs of customers and relies on the formation of simple and affordable cloud infrastructure, characterized by increased reliability and accessibility for all.

Serverspace provides customers with virtual servers in clouds based on VMware and vStack hyperconverged platform. The latter enables the creation of high-performance virtual machines based on both Enterprise hardware and standard appliances. With vStack, a stable server can be created in seconds. Customers can place any amount of data in the cloud. Administrators and developers can use the regularly updated knowledge base to quickly understand how Serverspace cloud services work.

The goal is to reduce costs and simplify administration

For Serverspace, reliability, proven technologies and a good reputation of the manufacturer are important. Therefore, the company initially chose the platform of the world’s largest developer VMware as its virtualization system. This solution has successfully established itself in the international market and has gained popularity among cloud users all over the world.

However, the VMware solution has not only strong points, but also disadvantages. First of all, it is the high price of the solution for customers:

• users of a US developer’s platform need to purchase expensive hardware and maintain it
• VMware includes a serious license load;
• In addition, the solution requires a large staff of highly qualified specialists to support it, which increases personnel costs. In the classic virtualization approach, the infrastructure consists of elements with specific or dedicated roles: compute, storage and networking. Each element uses equipment from different vendors. One or two people cannot maintain such a complex and disparate infrastructure.

VMware’s solution is complemented by the vStack platform

After analyzing the situation, Serverspace specialists came to the conclusion that provisioning VMs on the VMware platform required too many resources. To reduce infrastructure support costs, they decided to switch from convergence to hyperconvergence. However, moving to VMware’s HCI solution would have been even more costly. In this case, the provider would have to increase prices for customers, which was contrary to the original plan. Therefore, the decision was made to choose an additional platform that would run parallel to VMware.

The new solution had to reduce hardware and personnel costs and at the same time increase the performance of the virtualized environment. The solution based on KVM and OpenStack was attractive due to the absence of license costs. But such a platform would require constant improvement and serious investments in infrastructure development and support. Testing of OpenStack in CPU overcommit conditions showed deplorable results, far from practical values in public clouds.

As a result, the hyperconverged solution vStack was chosen, which became one of the main solutions for Serverspace virtualization.

Advantages of vStack over other platforms

vStack is a hyperconverged platform from ITGLOBAL.COM LABS. Serverspace chose vStack in 2019 despite the fact that at that time the virtualization platform had just entered the market. The reason is its hyper-converged approach, which enabled the provider to reduce hardware costs and simplify infrastructure management. In addition, the young vStack solution was not inferior to VMware in terms of performance.

Here are a few pros of the vStack platform:

• The HCI solution consists of: vStack OS, vStack Storage, vStack Network and vStack Management. There are no role-based components in hyperconverged platforms: storage, compute networking, and virtualization resources are integrated into a single platform. The vStack solution can be managed through a single interface. A single specialist is sufficient for this task, so the company does not need to hire a whole team of administrators. This reduces IT infrastructure and maintenance costs and simplifies scaling;
• a developer can create an Enterprise-level virtual data center using consumer-grade hardware without sacrificing performance;
• CPU overcommit is a strong point of the vStack platform, which allowed to seriously increase cost efficiency;
• Another advantage of the vStack hyperconverged platform is the ability to quickly scale infrastructure and replace failed elements;
• vStack virtual machine snapshots have a significant advantage: they contain the configuration, including virtual network ports;
• In addition, a vStack VM will cost the customer half as much as a VM on VMware.

With vStack, Serverspace came out on top in terms of VM performance

To save resources on the maintenance of the hyperconverged vStack platform, Serverspace has activated the Managed vStack service. Thanks to this service, the provider can don’t waste time and money on platform maintenance and instead direct them to the development of their own projects.

Despite having a solution from both vStack and VMware, Serverspace has risen to the top spot in terms of performance by utilizing the vStack hyperconverged platform. With vStack it takes just one second to create a virtual machine. A new virtual machine can be available in as little as 15-40 seconds. At the same time, the cost of VMs on vStack is half that of VMware.

Also thanks to the cooperation between Serverspace and vStack the provider’s customers can quickly get the functionality they need in the form of customizations or platform upgrades