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v5 hardware is currently available for deployment in our Ashburn, VA data center and can be ordered directly through our Bare Metal and Private Cloud catalogs. For deployments in other data center locations or for custom configurations, please contact our team.
There’s a particular frustration that sets in once you’re running on the public cloud at any real scale. The platform is genuinely good at handing you infrastructure on demand, but the bill arrives with charges you can’t forecast, egress fees that punish you for moving your own data, and a rate card that climbs as you grow. You want what the cloud does. You just want it on terms you actually control.
That’s the gap a hosted private cloud fills, and it’s a separate question from whether to run on bare metal. OpenMetal builds one from the same v5 hardware you’d otherwise run as bare metal, delivered as a private OpenStack and Ceph cloud that’s entirely yours. This post is about the workloads that belong there: the ones that want cloud-style provisioning and self-service, not a single dedicated server and not someone else’s meter.
What you’re actually getting
A hosted private cloud starts as three identical v5 servers stood up as a hyper-converged cluster, live in well under a minute. OpenStack runs the control plane (Nova for compute, Cinder for block storage, Neutron for networking), and Ceph provides distributed storage that replicates across all three nodes, so losing a node doesn’t lose data. You get the full OpenStack API and the Horizon dashboard for self-service, and you scale by adding more identical nodes, compute and storage growing independently as you need them.
The operational difference from bare metal is the important part. Version upgrades, patching, Ceph health, and hardware replacement are handled by our team, so you’re consuming a cloud rather than operating a cluster. Here’s where that model fits best.
Migrating off VMware
This is the big one right now. Teams facing VMware licensing changes are looking for somewhere to land, and a private OpenStack and Ceph cloud is a natural target: no vSphere or vSAN licensing, full API and dashboard access, and Ceph replacing your SAN. Ramp pricing means you don’t pay for two environments at once during the cutover. If you’re evaluating a move, this is the deployment model to look at.
An internal cloud for multiple teams
If you have several teams that all need infrastructure, handing each of them OpenStack projects with quotas and budgets is cleaner than parceling out bare metal servers. Self-service provisioning of VMs, volumes, and networks through the API or Horizon means teams move at their own pace, while you keep multi-tenant isolation and a fixed top-line cost. The budget controls are built in: you set a maximum spend per cloud, and provisioning requests that would exceed it are denied.
Choose v5 hardware as standalone bare metal servers or as a fully managed three-server hyperconverged private cloud. v5 is available now in Ashburn, VA (US East). Order today from the catalog and deploy in minutes.
Bare Metal Catalog Hosted Private Cloud Catalog
SaaS platforms
Building a product on someone else’s metered cloud means your unit economics move every time a customer gets busy. Running it on your own private cloud gives you predictable per-customer costs, fixed monthly infrastructure spend, and egress billed on the 95th percentile rather than per gigabyte. You still get cloud-style provisioning to scale your fleet, you just get it on infrastructure you control. For growing SaaS providers, that predictability is often worth more than scale-to-zero.
Dev, test, and staging fleets
Ephemeral environments are a perfect fit for a self-service cloud. Spin up a staging stack from the API, snapshot a volume with Ceph, tear it down when you’re done, and never think about which physical server it lands on. Because the capacity is yours at a fixed price, there’s no meter running while a test environment sits idle over a weekend.
Kubernetes with an IaaS underneath
Plenty of teams want Kubernetes but also want the infrastructure layer underneath to be a real cloud they can provision against. Running Kubernetes on top of your OpenStack cloud gives you that: cluster nodes as OpenStack instances, Ceph RBD for persistent volumes, and Neutron for networking, all self-service. You get the elasticity of cloud Kubernetes without the per-cluster fees or the lock-in.
Object storage and S3 workloads
Ceph also speaks S3. If you’re paying public cloud object-storage egress, a private cluster with Ceph object storage is a credible S3 alternative with fair, predictable egress, and it lives right next to your compute on the same private fabric.
Bare metal or private cloud, or both
The honest answer to “which one” is that it depends on how much platform you want to operate. Bare metal gives you the raw machine and maximum control; the hosted private cloud gives you cloud operations and self-service with the heavy lifting handled. Many teams run both and connect them over the 40 Gbps private network, for example a database tier on dedicated Large v5 servers feeding an application tier running in an OpenStack cloud, with private traffic between them never counting as billable egress.
If a private cloud sounds like the right shape for what you’re building, you can talk to our team about a proof-of-concept cluster to validate fit before you commit. And if you want to go the other direction and run workloads directly on the hardware, that’s covered in a companion post on v5 bare metal.
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