New Host Management Features
Fresh from Witsbits:
In this post I’ll focus on the new host operation and host management features we’ve released over the last month. Hope you like it!
1. Custom Host Scripts – Write scripts to tune your hosts
Let’s say you have a hardware RAID controller and want to install it’s accompanying monitoring and alerts tool (i.e. the type of software that sends a text message to your phone when there’s something fishy with your drives). In this case Custom Host Scripts enables you to automate the deployment and configuration of that software as your blank servers start up.
All scripts are stored centrally in your Witsbits account, simplifying orchestration and maintenance of your scripts and making it easy to overview which scripts are assigned to what hosts.
We’re putting together a catalog of scripts for common use cases. These scripts are available in your account and you can either use them as is or as a start point for your own custom scripts.
We write scripts for you: If you have a common use case where you think scripting makes sense, please contact us and we’d be happy to help you write the script and publish it in the public catalog (and you’ll of course get a personalized version if that’s needed).
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| Find the host scripts by selecting a host server |
2. Host Storage Management
We’re doing a whole series of upgrades to Witsbits’ storage management and first out we’ve enabled freedom to choose between any of the local hard drives on the host to store your VMs on.
We’ve got more storage improvements cooking and we plan to push them out in a pretty quick phase. So if you have any thoughts on how you want to manage storage for your hosts (or guests for that matter), please get in touch quickly. We always develop new features in close contact with users with real use cases – so your feedback will, in a very real way, impact on the product.
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| Select which hard drive to use for storing virtual machines |
3. SSH Access to Hosts
We have extended the Host Access functionality to enable access via SSH (previously you had to walk over to the terminal to log in – no more, no more).
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| Enabling SSH for host access |
And don’t forget:
You sign up for Witsbits here!