IT is a complex system of hardware and software working together to run our modern industries and economies. No vendor can know or test every combination of IT solutions. For this reason, some choose to be overly cautious and declare perfectly valid solutions unsupported. These practices are inhibitors to innovators and IT departments that want to take advantage of groundbreaking technologies.
If it weren’t for early adopters ignoring the ambiguous rules of supported or unsupported, new technologies would never get off the ground. It often only takes common sense to overcome the misinformation surrounding application support. At Scale Computing, trust is placed on the ability of IT vendors to come together to ensure support for applications, operating systems, virtualization, and hardware by putting customers first.
Applications Run on Operating Systems
The operating system lies between the computing hardware and the business applications that run our industries.
Most of these applications run on Windows or Linux operating systems. Some of these applications work directly with specific pieces of hardware, but the majority work only with the logical abstraction of the hardware from the operating system. In other words, the applications don’t care what kind of processor, memory, or storage is in the server's physical hardware, only that sufficient CPU, RAM, network access, and storage resources are available.
Operating systems have so successfully made applications indifferent to hardware specifics that adding a hypervisor between the OS and hardware should not change anything about how the application runs. If it is running on a supported OS and has sufficient resources, the particular hypervisor has no impact on the operation of the application.
Application abstraction from physical hardware is practically the basis for the popularity of server virtualization. If an application can run in any virtualized environment, then there is little reason to believe it cannot run on Scale Computing HyperCore. This is because SC//HyperCore is a virtualization platform that uses a KVM-based hypervisor to support Windows and Linux operating systems. Before asking whether an application will be supported on SC//HyperCore, a few other questions should be answered first:
Is the application tied to any specific server hardware components?
Is the application licensing tied to any specific hardware components?
Is the application specifically designed to interact with the virtualization hypervisor?
If the answer to these questions is no, which is true for most applications, then the only remaining question should be:
Is the application supported on Windows or Linux?
If the answer to this question is yes, then it will run on SC//HyperCore.
What Applications Does Scale Computing Support?
One common question prospective customers ask is, “Are my applications supported on Scale Computing HyperCore?” The answer to that question, at least 99% of the time, is “Yes, the application is supported and works great.” In most cases, Scale Computing can reference numerous SC//HyperCore users running the applications requested.
Scale Computing supports the entire SC//Platform of hardware, software, and services. This includes the HyperCoreTM operating system which includes software-defined storage and the virtualization hypervisor. Scale Computing provides a clear list of supported operating systems including Windows and Linux operating system versions and editions in the HyperCore Support Matrix.
Scale Computing supports and offers fixes for our hardware and virtualization platform. For applications, Scale Computing is fully prepared to support Windows and Linux operating systems running on SC//HyperCore and therefore, applications designed to run on Windows and Linux should be supported by their vendors for SC//HyperCore. Operating system vendors offer fixes for operating system issues. Application vendors offer fixes for application issues. Working together, there should be no issue supporting applications on SC//HyperCore that are designed to run on Windows or Linux.