netFIELD OS Datacenter

Owned by Marek Meyer
2023-02-02
2 min read

netFIELD OS Datacenter is a virtualized version of netFIELD OS running under VMware or KVM on x86 CPU-based machines. This option enables you to run some components of your distributed IoT solution in a data center or an any other server hardware with virtualization layer, while managing the software distribution and IoT data flow through netFIELD Cloud. 

netFIELD OS Datacenter is the netFIELD Operating System for virtual machines respectively virtualization environments. It runs on all hardware platforms supporting VMware® vSphere ESXi or KVM (Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisors.

It offers the same functions and features as the netFIELD OS running “natively” in netFIELD Connect and netFIELD OnPremise edge devices; but – being a virtual machine – allows you flexible assignment of hardware resources (like CPU cores, memory, data storage and network adapters) according to your needs.
It is thus an alternative to the netFIELD Connect and netFIELD OnPremise edge devices if your use case demands higher or scalable hardware capabilities.

Key features of the netFIELD OS

  • The netFIELD OS features the Local Device Manager , which is a web-based GUI for local device parameterization.
  • Applications for data acquisition, analytics, processing or connectivity (to cloud or other enterprise systems) do not run natively under the netFIELD OS, but as “containers” in a Docker runtime. netFIELD OS provides two Docker runtimes that are running simultaneously on the
    virtual machine:
    • IoT Edge Docker for remote and automatic deployment and maintenance of containers. These containers are deployed (“pulled”) and managed via the netFIELD Platform. This requires your netFIELD OS Datacenter to be “onboarded” in the netFIELD Portal.
    • Standard Docker for manual and local deployment and maintenance of containers. Those containers can be pulled from official registries like Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com) or any locally hosted Docker registry.
  • All i86-compliant netFIELD Apps are supported except for apps using netX resources. 

Services supported by the netFIELD OS

  • Network interface configuration
  • Secure communication to the netFIELD Platform services
  • Remote control/access of Datacenter via netFIELD Portal (protected by “four-eyes principle”, must be enabled in Local Device Manager)
  • Firewall configuration (NAT, TCP/IP port management)
  • HTTP(S) Proxy Server configuration
  • IoT Edge Docker instance for application container managed via netFIELD Platform
  • Additional Docker instance for locally managed containers, including Docker Compose support
  • netFIELD OS update (local/remote) support
  • Onboarding in netFIELD Portal
  • Selection of upstream protocol to the netFIELD Platform (AMQP, AMQPWS, MQTT or MQTTWS)
  • Network storage (NFS, iSCSI) support
  • Resources monitoring
  • Access to netFIELD OS and Docker services via a web-terminal or over SSH
  • System and container logging