computer science

OrionVM

OrionVM is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand OrionVM rather than just read about it. In short: OrionVM Wholesale Pty Limited (trading as OrionVM) is an Australian infrastructure as a service provider and white-label cloud platform. Resellers present customers with a rebranded interface for deploying virtual machine instances, which are only billed for what their customers use.

Key takeaways

OrionVM belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect OrionVM to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of OrionVM from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

OrionVM Wholesale Pty Limited (trading as OrionVM) is an Australian infrastructure as a service provider and white-label cloud platform. Resellers present customers with a rebranded interface for deploying virtual machine instances, which are only billed for what their customers use. Cloud Harmony benchmarked the OrionVM Cloud Platform's InfiniBand-backed network storage as the world's fastest in 2011. The company was founded and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with offices in San Francisco, California.

History OrionVM was founded in a dorm by Sheng Yeo, Alex Sharp and Joseph Glanville in 2010. The company's cloud platform was developed while the founders were still students at the University of Technology, Sydney and University of Sydney. After fifteen months of development, their cloud platform entered a Public Beta programme, with a full launch on 1 April 2011. In 2011, the company received angel investments from Australian entrepreneur and PIPE Networks co-founder Stephen Baxter and American Gordon Bell of DEC and Microsoft Research. For his work at OrionVM, CEO Sheng Yeo was nominated for the 2012 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year and the 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2014, OrionVM received a State Merit award and a National Finalist nomination in the 2014 iAwards, with CTO Alex Sharp winning the Hills YIA Cloud award. The company was nominated for a Stevie Award for New Product or Service of the Year in Cloud Infrastructure Software, and an Australian Startup Awards nomination. In 2016, Yeo and Sharp were named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.

Products OrionVM sells a wholesale cloud infrastructure platform for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. Vendors can white-label the platform for resale, or for internal use. Prominent resellers include:

Australian telephone company AAPT BizCloud IT broker StrataCore.

Technology OrionVM uses the Xen hypervisor to virtualise multiple machines (referred to as "instances") on the same hardware. Linux instances use paravirtualisation for reduced overhead by default, with Windows Server being deployed using hardware-assisted virtualisation (HVM). Traditional virtual private server and infrastructure as a service providers consolidate storage into a storage area network, which is limited by Ethernet network speeds and best-effort reliability. OrionVM's platform took design cues from supercomputers by placing hypervisor storage and compute on the same physical servers. These are backed by a decentralised InfiniBand fabric. This improves network reliability and performance, and allows for rapid rollover between physical hosts for high availability.

Features

Rebranded panel To end users, the base of the platform consists of a web panel, where customers are able to deploy virtual machines. For resellers, the logos and theme can be modified to suit their own branding.

Instances From the panel, users can deploy preconfigured instances with their chosen operating system and required memory. Additional storage disks and IP addresses can be created separately, then assigned to new or existing instances. After shutting down, further resources can be allocated or scaled down.

Access Instances can be accessed out-of-band via a web-based serial console or VNC session. Access is also available via ovm_ctl, an open source command line interface available from GitHub and the pip package manager. Linux machines come preconfigured with SSH, and Windows with RDP for remote access.

Templates Instances can be provisioned from a series of predefined templates, which can be customised if required. They include:

CentOS Debian Linux FreeBSD Slackware Linux Ubuntu Server (long-term support releases) Microsoft Windows Server Vyatta templates are officially supported for software-defined logical networking between instances.

API A public API exists for controlling instances. Open source Python bindings are available on GitHub.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with OrionVM

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what OrionVM claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to OrionVM before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about OrionVM ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of OrionVM

In research: OrionVM appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses OrionVM in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: OrionVM is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Australian brands, Australian companies established in 2010, Cloud computing providers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for OrionVM outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study OrionVM in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what OrionVM means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain OrionVM out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is OrionVM in simple terms?

Why does OrionVM matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study OrionVM?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on OrionVM.