Windows VM Hosting
The platform enables service providers to offer traditional virtual machines with Windows workloads in the same topology side by side with Linux containers. This approach provides high density, improves hardware utilization and reduces management complexity by eliminating the need to use any additional VM orchestration platform on a separate infrastructure.
Be aware that Windows VM hosting is supported on the bare-metal hardware only (not on the virtual machines).
1. In order to enable VM-based Windows hosting, you need to Build Windows VM Template (e.g., Windows Server 2019 or 2022) and add it to the required hosts (i.e., ones that will provide Windows VM support).
Tip: If you are not confident, such adjustment can be performed by our engineers for an additional fee (contact your TAM to request).
Once a Windows VM appears at the admin panel’s Templates section, you need to make it available in the end-users’ topology wizard through publishing.
2. If needed, you can configure distribution rules for your Windows VM template to ensure that it is installed only on the host(s) that are licensed appropriately:
- add a label to the hosts with Windows support (e.g., windows)
- configure distribution settings for the Windows template (e.g., as it is shown in the image below)
3. You need to define Windows VM pricing plans that will be offered within your PaaS installation.
- VMs operate with a fixed set of resources, so prepare a tariff grid with required resource plans (grid items). Each item defines the amount of reserved resources (grid options) - RAM and vCPU cores in this case.
- The price per hour for the VM with these resources is defined in the associated tariffs.
Note: To avoid additional charges, you must add dynamic and reserved cloudlets to the Override Types field of your Windows VM tariffs.
- Create a tariff for the Reserved Disk Space that applies to the Windows VM template only. Add this tariff to your pricing model. As a result, Windows VMs disk will be charged differently from the regular nodes.
- Traffic is charged in the same way as for the regular containers, so no additional configurations are required for VMs.
4. Please, contact your TAM and inform about preparation being done (license obtained, hosts prepared, distribution configured, pricing info provided) so that the PaaS team could perform required adjustments (scripts, JPS packages) to enable new template creation from the end-user dashboard.
5. You can manage the availability of the VMs feature for end-users by adjusting the appropriate vm.nodes.enabled quota.
Refer to the User Experience guide for information on how to manage VMs via the user’s dashboard.
