Midokura today released its newest version of Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM). The latest iteration enables users to connect multiple OpenStack clouds, add more support for containers, and gives users the ability to examine the connectivity between physical and virtual layers.

The software provides a network virtualization overlay for connectivity between OpenStack private clouds, but “people were hesitant because they couldn’t examine the underlay because there was an overlay,” says Susan Wu, director of technical marketing with Midokura. “With this release we allow them to examine the connectivity between virtual and physical. We take insights from the overlay down to the underlay.”

In addition, the latest release expands its support to include the container orchestration engine Kubernetes. MEM already supported Docker Swarm for container-based environments.

“More organizations are adopting containers, but they don’t want two management paradigms,” says Wu. “With MidoNet they can have one network management solution across both environments.”

Also in this release, a new MEM router peering feature provides overlay connectivity between multiple sites where OpenStack is deployed. The direct connectivity between multiple sites eliminates the need for constant backup procedures in disaster recovery scenarios and reduces control traffic and broadcast storms across multiple sites.

Wu says more organizations are building multi-cloud sites, often establishing a second cloud for disaster recovery. “One customer said a failover could take 15 nail-biting minutes, but with MidoNet it’s instantaneous,” she says.

Finally, the latest MEM release includes a 75 percent improvement in memory usage. More efficient use of memory by the virtual machines can lead to better application stability and improve application response time.