VMTurbo, the only demand-driven control platform for the software-defined data center, today announced the specifications of its special edition TurboStack home lab giveaway, being offered to booth visitors at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. The TurboStack home lab comes pre-loaded with a 7-node nested OpenStack environment, managed by VMTurbo Operations Manager.

Looking Inside the TurboStack Home Lab

“Having a safe, sandbox environment to test cutting-edge technologies before introducing them to a corporate environment is essential,” said Eric Wright, Principal Solutions Engineer and Technology Evangelist at VMTurbo. “My home lab has always been my go-to for experimenting with the latest and greatest technologies before bringing them to my corporate data center, as I did with each new release of OpenStack. We designed the TurboStack for those interested in experimenting and getting practical experience in OpenStack on their own before testing it in a larger environment.”

The VMTurbo TurboStack Home Lab is powered by Intel NUC complete with an Intel i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM, using a 256 GB Solid State Drive for internal storage. It is backed by a Synology DS415+, containing two 1 TB SATA drives. This personal NAS provides the power to store and deliver data, giving a great deal of storage growth capability for future drive additions. Connecting the storage and compute is a Cisco SG300-10, providing 10 managed 1 GB ports to deliver fast access to the TurboStack environment.

The TurboStack Home Lab comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Server edition, with full GUI environment, to be used as a complete GUI enabler server platform, or a standalone server with complete remote management capabilities. It also runs VirtualBox and Vagrant to support the TurboStack nested OpenStack lab environment.

Based on the OpenStack Cookbook lab design spec, the TurboStack includes a controller node, two KVM compute nodes, a storage node, a networking node and two object storage nodes. The 7-node home lab provides an opportunity to test multiple features and capabilities of OpenStack while removing the challenge of initial configuration and set up. Updates to the TurboStack will also be coming with integration to leading container and PaaS platforms, further enhancing the learning experience.

OpenStack Summit

From May 18 to 22, VMTurbo will be exhibiting at booth T12 at the OpenStack Summit, a five-day conference for developers, users and administrators of OpenStack Cloud Software. Eric Wright, aka @DiscoPosse, will be leading a session called “Couch to OpenStack” on Thursday, May 21, beginning at 11:00 a.m. The session is designed as a launchpad for newcomers to the open source platform, to advance their knowledge of OpenStack by using all available resources and through the power of the OpenStack Community.

“For years now, VMTurbo has been an active member and contributor to OpenStack as well as a supporter of the open source community,” said Endre Sara, VP of Advanced Solutions at VMTurbo. “Our mission of improving the IT industry through demand-driven control is perfectly aligned with the OpenStack initiative, providing users the freedom and flexibility to leverage the full potential of a cloud computing architecture of their choosing.”

VMTurbo is a proud supporter of the OpenStack Foundation and open source. The VMTurbo engineering team includes individual OpenStack code contributors, and our open source contributions are available at https://github.com/vmturbo. Enabling further adoption of the OpenStack cloud platform with existing and new customers continues to be a major goal for the team.

Those unable to attend the OpenStack Summit have an additional opportunity to win a TurboStack home lab by completing our survey before April 6, 2015. Visit our website for complete Terms & Conditions.