Mirantis Inc. today debuted MOSK 24.2, the latest release of its Kubernetes-powered OpenStack distribution.

Campbell, California-based Mirantis sells software for managing cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Alongside its OpenStack distribution, the company develops Lens Desktop, a popular tool for configuring Kubernetes clusters. Its software portfolio also spans several other product categories, including cybersecurity.

MOSK, the focus of today’s product update, is a kind of operating system for powering on-premises infrastructure. The software combines OpenStack’s infrastructure management with Kubernetes. According to Mirantis, the latter framework is used to ease tasks such as downloading updates and recovering from malfunctions.

MOSK 24.2 adds two main enhancements. The first is a load balancer, Distributed Resource Balancer, that Mirantis says will make its OpenStack distribution a more competitive alternative to VMware LLC’s vSphere. The second major change is that the new 24.2 release is based on OpenStack Caracal, the latest major release of the upstream platform.

Production OpenStack clusters often comprise a large number of servers. With the new Distributed Resource Balancer in MOSK 24.2, a company can automatically distribute its workloads among the servers in a cluster. Mirantis describes the tool as being comparable to the Distributed Resource Scheduler feature in vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform.

Automating the task of distributing workloads among servers solves two challenges. 

First, it avoids so-called hotspots, or situations where some servers in a cluster run more workloads than they can manage while other machines run too few or none at all. Mirantis says that its new load balancer also addresses the so-called noisy neighbor problem. That phenomenon emerges when two workloads deployed on the same overburdened server interfere with one another.

“MOSK is a viable and proven open source-based technology option especially relevant as many VMware users seek alternatives,” said Mirantis Chief Technology Officer Shaun O’Meara. “It is engineered as an ideal host environment for migrated VMware VM workloads – enabling businesses to achieve optimal resource management and network performance on open infrastructure with proven reliability.”

The latest MOSK release is based on OpenStack Caracal, a new version of the upstream platform that rolled out in April. The latter update introduced several enhancements including a set of features designed to optimize artificial intelligence workloads.

According to OpenStack’s maintainers, Caracal adds bug fixes that will enable applications to more efficiently use graphics processing units. The release also includes a so-called vGPU live migration tool. Administrators can use it to move AI workloads from one GPU server to another without incurring downtime. 

There are several situations where the ability to migrate an application between servers is useful. If a vulnerability is found in a server’s operating system, OpenStack’s vGPU live migration tool can temporarily park the server’s workloads on a secure machine while administrators download a patch. Moving applications is also necessary when the hardware on which they run experiences a malfunction.

MOSK combines OpenStack’s core features with two other open-source technologies: Ceph and OVN. Ceph is a storage management tool that can hold data in the form of blocks, objects and files. OVN provides networking features for moving data between the workloads in an OpenStack cluster.

Image: Mirantis