Lightbits is excited to announce that Photon, our new multi-cluster management GUI, is now available as a technology preview! Photon is designed to help users manage multiple Lightbits clusters more efficiently, providing a set of useful capabilities in an intuitive interface. This early preview will allow you to explore Photon’s features. We eagerly await your feedback as we continue to refine it.
Important Disclaimer and Warning
Photon is currently a technology preview, meaning that it is intended strictly for evaluation and testing purposes. This version is not suitable for managing production environments. We encourage you to use Photon only in non-production environments for testing and providing feedback.
What is Photon?
Photon is a next-generation GUI solution, built to simplify the management of multiple Lightbits clusters. With Photon, you can monitor cluster health, manage storage, and explore various functionalities that make cluster operations smoother and more accessible. This technology preview version offers a glimpse into the core features, allowing you to evaluate how Photon can fit into your environment.
Key Features of Photon:
- Multi-cluster management: Attach and manage multiple Lightbits clusters with ease.
- Storage operations: Provision volumes, create snapshots, and monitor system health.
- User-friendly interface: Designed for simplicity, Photon enables quick access to a range of useful functionalities like volume creation and cluster monitoring.
- Preview limitations: As an early version, some features (such as user management and cluster upgrade functionality) are not fully operational yet, but we’re actively working on enhancing them.
Supported Use Cases
While in public preview, the following use cases are supported:
- Volume management: create and delete volumes
- Snapshot management: create and delete snapshots, as well as create volumes from snapshots
- Basic health and event monitoring: track health and key events across multiple clusters
- Track capacity, allocation, and usage: easily track capacity and volume allocation across clusters
Some features are still not supported and are listed in detail in the installation document.
Supported Environments
The following are Photon’s supported deployment environments:
- VMware vCenter: Easily deploy Photon as a VM using our provided OVF template.
- QEMU-KVM: Deploy Photon on Linux-based hypervisors using our Qcow2 image.
Getting Started with Photon
Photon is currently available to existing Lightbits customers. Follow the details and instructions provided here to deploy Photon in your preferred environment (VMware or QEMU-KVM), attach your clusters, and start exploring the interface.
Please note: This release is strictly a technology preview and should not be used in production environments. We’re inviting you to try it out in testing environments and provide valuable feedback that will guide future improvements.
Inside Photon: Screenshots
Main Dashboard
The dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the overall status of all clusters being managed in Photon, allowing you to quickly assess cluster health, capacity, and performance.
Volume Creation Dialog
The volume creation dialog allows you to easily create a new volume by specifying key properties such as the volume name, size, compression settings, replica count, and more.
Snapshot Creation Dialog
The snapshot creation dialog enables you to create a snapshot by defining properties such as the snapshot name, retention time, description, and more.
Volumes View
The volumes view allows you to monitor volumes from a specific cluster. For each volume, you can see key properties such as state, size, capacity, compression, and more. Additionally, you can filter and sort the view to easily find and organize the information you need.
Servers View
Share Your Feedback
Your experience is crucial to the development of Photon. If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for new features, we encourage you to share your thoughts with us or visit us on our Slack channel. Your feedback will directly influence the direction and capabilities of Photon’s future versions.
