# HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.1 Overview
The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is a unified container platform built and designed for both cloud-native applications and stateful analytics applications running on any infrastructure either on-premises, in public clouds, in a hybrid model, or at the edge.
HPE Ezmeral Container Platform installs as a software layer between the underlying server infrastructure and the Big Data distribution, AI/ML libraries, and applications. The use of Docker is completely transparent and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform customers benefit from the greater agility and bare metal performance due to the lightweight nature of the containers. Customers can leverage the flexibility of the containers to simplify development for DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and application modernization across hybrid cloud deployments.
Figure 1 shows the high-level HPE Ezmeral Container Platform architecture.
Figure 1. HPE Ezmeral Container Platform architecture
HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.1 includes the following new features:
Figure 2. HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.1 What's New
SLES Support: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform may now be deployed on hosts running the SLES operating system, in addition to RHEL/CentOS. See Operating System Requirements.
Import External Kubernetes Clusters: Admins may now import existing Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (EKS) from Amazon Web Services and CNCF_compliant Kubernetes clusters on-premises into HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. See Importing an External Kubernetes Cluster.
Expanded Kubernetes Cluster Masters: Kubernetes clusters may now have up to seven (7) Master nodes/hosts. See Creating a New Kubernetes Cluster.
SELinux Supported for Kubernetes Hosts: Kubernetes hosts in an HPE Ezmeral Container Platform deployment can now support unrestricted SELinux. See Configuration Requirements.
Rolling Upgrades: This feature upgrades HPE Ezmeral Container Platform version 5.1 to a future version on a host-by-host basis, thereby minimizing downtime and enhancing upgrade failure handling. See Upgrading the Platform.
Elasticsearch Upgrades: Dashboards and status upgrades are more responsive and visible.
# HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Controller
HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Controller is installed and configured on 3x HPE Synergy compute nodes. HPE Synergy D3940 Storage Module is used for ephemeral node storage. Platform-level high availability functionality is enabled to protect the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform against the failure of the Controller host. Platform-level high availability requires designated two worker hosts, such as Shadow Controller and Arbiter.
# Gateway load balancer
Gateway server provides a connection to HPE Ezmeral Container Platform managed Kubernetes cluster services. All public service end-points in KubeDirector managed Kubernetes clusters will be exposed via HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Gateway re-mapped ports. Redundancy for Gateway hosts is provided by creating two sets of gateway servers by mapping multiple Gateway host IP addresses to a single hostname. This ensures that there is no single point of failure for the Gateway host. When this is done, then either the DNS server or an external load balancer will load-balance requests to the hostname among all the Gateway hosts on a round-robin basis. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has implemented gateway nodes on two (2) HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Compute Modules.
NOTE
HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Gateway load balancer (LB) nodes are deployed on physical machine.
# HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes installs the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric components as pods within a Kubernetes (K8s) Cluster. This storage is configured using three (3) HPE Synergy Compute as K8s masters and five (5) HPE Apollo 4200 servers as K8s nodes. Once the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes is installed, the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will configure the persistent data fabric for AI and analytics and Kubernetes (K8s) workload. All applications running in containers will be able to natively access data across the fabric. This data fabric is a distributed file and object store from MapR that manages both structured and unstructured data. It is designed to store data at an exabyte scale, support trillions of files, and combine analytics and operations into a single platform. It supports industry standard protocols and APIs, including POSIX, NFS, S3, and HDFS.
# Kubernetes cluster
This consists of a bare metal Kubernetes cluster built on top of HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Compute Modules and HPE Synergy D3940 Storage that can manage multiple versions of Kubernetes clusters with multitenant container isolation and data access for any workload from edge to core to cloud. The deployment of Kubernetes cluster is achieved using the proven HPE Ezmeral Container Platform software.