Supported hypervisors

Pexip Infinity currently offers specific support for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Xen hypervisors. Other hypervisors and orchestration layers, such as Citrix XenServer, may be used but are not officially supported by Pexip.

Note that suspending and resuming Virtual Machines that are running the Pexip Infinity Management Node or Conferencing Nodes is not supported.

The Pexip Infinity platform can also be deployed as a cloud service via Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, with private, public or hybrid deployment options.

VMware vSphere ESXi

VMware versions

Version 19 of the Pexip Infinity platform supports VMware vSphere ESXi 5.x and 6.x, although we recommend ESXi 5.5 or higher. Support for ESXi 4.1 is being deprecated - if you have upgraded from a version prior to v12, you can still deploy Conferencing Nodes to servers running ESXi 4.1; however if you have a new deployment using v12 or later and attempt to deploy a Conferencing Node to a server running ESXi 4.1, that node will go straight into maintenance mode.

You must have a suitable VMware environment already installed. For information on configuring a VMware environment specifically for use with Pexip Infinity, see Configuring VMware for Pexip Infinity and Advanced VMware ESXi administration.

VMware editions

The Pexip Infinity platform will run on the free edition of vSphere Hypervisor. However, this edition has a number of limitations (limited support from VMware, no access to vCenter or vMotion, no access to VMware API). In particular, the lack of access to the VMware API means that all Conferencing Nodes will have to be deployed manually (see Deployment environments). For this reason we do not recommend its use except in smaller deployments, or test or demo environments.

The minimum edition of VMware that we recommend is the vSphere Standard edition. This does not have the limitations of the free edition. If you do not already use VMware in your enterprise, the vSphere Essentials Kit is a simple way to get started and will provide you with Standard edition licenses for 3 servers (with 2 CPUs each) plus a vCenter license.

The Enterprise Plus edition includes further additional features relevant to the Pexip Infinity platform that could be of benefit to larger deployments. These include Storage DRS and Distributed Switch.

For a comparison of the VMware editions, see http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere.html#compare.

Microsoft Hyper-V

Version 19 of Pexip Infinity supports Microsoft Hyper-V in the form of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 and later, or Windows Server 2012 and later. You must have a suitable Hyper-V environment already installed. For information on configuring a Hyper-V environment specifically for use with Pexip Infinity, see Configuring Hyper-V for Pexip Infinity.

KVM

For information on configuring a KVM environment specifically for use with Pexip Infinity, see Configuring KVM for Pexip Infinity.

Xen

Pexip Infinity requires Xen 4.2 and later. For information on configuring a Xen environment specifically for use with Pexip Infinity, see Configuring Xen for Pexip Infinity.

Other hypervisors and orchestration layers

Pexip Infinity Management Nodes and Conferencing Nodes support static IP addressing only. Therefore the hypervisor or orchestration layer must also support static IP addressing. For more information, see Installing Pexip Infinity on other hypervisors.

Cloud service providers

The Pexip Infinity platform can also be deployed as a cloud service via Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, with private, public or hybrid deployment options.