BEIJING, July 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — SmartX has released CloudTower 2.0, a central management platform for multiple clusters across data centers. CloudTower is a crucial member of the SmartX HCI product portfolio, providing visibility and easy management across all HCI clusters. With new features including cross-cluster VM migration, content library, VM user view, access control and security settings, and an optimized interface, CloudTower 2.0 has improved the efficiency, security, and user experience for operations and maintenance.

In addition, the optimized interface and VM user view are also included in the community edition of CloudTower, as part of the SmartX HCI Kit Community Edition.

Below are the details of the new features.

This feature supports the unified management of multiple clusters and cross-cluster sharing of virtual machine templates and ISO images. Users could create virtual machine templates and upload ISO images in one cluster and get access to all of them on any other clusters managed by CloudTower, reducing repetitive tasks.

This feature supports VM migration across clusters through hot migration, cold migration and staged migration. 1) Hot migration: allows users to migrate powered-on VMs without any interruption in services. It requires a directly connected network among clusters. 2) Cold migration: allows users to migrate powered-off VMs. A directly connected network is not necessary as data can be transmitted through CloudTower. 3) Staged migration: allows users to migrate full data without compromising VMs’ availability.

With VM user view, IT administrators could efficiently distribute VMs to users and allow users to use and manage VMs independently. Users could directly manage VMs’ downtime through CloudTower and access clients’ operational systems through the VNC panel.

This feature allows users to reinforce O&M security by restricting the access and login to CloudTower through the settings of Access Restriction, Session Timeout, Password Security and Custom Role.

Allows administrators to flexibly customize the interface through “dragging to customize the width of the resource navigator” and “customizing frequently-used function tabs in the cluster module”.

Increases management efficiency through “adding frequently used O&M functions such as Monitoring, Log, Snapshot Plan, etc., on each cluster’s management panel” and “adding Alert Email Notification and Recycle Bin Rule in each of their modules for an easy setting”.