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Roadmap

What Ballast does today, what is being built next, and what is being considered after that. Only "Available now" describes the product as it is. Everything else is intent: it has no dates, the order can change, and nothing is shipped until it appears in the release notes.

Available now

1.0

In the current release. See the release notes for the detail.

  • Hosts that keep working when the centre is offline

    Every agent caches its last-honoured desired state and keeps enforcing it while the centre is unreachable, then reconciles when it returns.

  • Clusters from scratch

    Failover clusters, Storage Spaces Direct, Cluster Shared Volumes and a quorum witness, from the New Cluster wizard or a reusable blueprint.

  • Standalone hosts as first-class citizens

    Networking, storage, iSCSI, volumes and VMs on a single host, managed from the same console as the clusters.

  • Drift handling by tier

    Cluster topology is locked, additions are applied, and changes to working configuration wait for approval.

  • Maintenance mode and rolling cluster updates

    Drain a node for planned work, or update a cluster one node at a time with the run pausing and naming where it stopped.

  • Replication and DR runbooks

    Hyper-V Replica to a standalone host or another cluster, and runbooks that bring a site back one tier at a time.

  • VM templates

    Capture a generalised VM with its hardware profile and guest customisation, and deploy it anywhere the centre reaches.

  • VMware to Hyper-V migration

    Register a vCenter or ESXi source, scan it, and import VMs with the console naming anything that blocks a move.

  • Browser console

    An interactive console for every VM and host, straight from the centre.

  • Alarms, events and metrics

    Alarm delivery by webhook and email, an activity feed, and 24-hour metrics on every host and VM.

  • Active Directory sign-in and roles

    Map AD groups to Administrator, Operator and Read-only, with local accounts kept as the break-glass login.

  • Backup, restore and updates

    Ballast Manager backs up and restores the centre and installs new centre and agent builds.

Next

Planned

Being designed or built now. Not in a release yet.

  • Power and energy

    A new view in the tree showing each host’s measured power draw, read from its management controller over Redfish, with energy used, running cost at your tariff and estimated CO₂ emissions at your grid’s carbon intensity. Rolled up by cluster and site.

  • Uptime monitor

    A new view in the tree for the services your VMs run, not just the VMs themselves: websites, API health endpoints, SQL Server, and any TCP service. Checks for response code and time, expected content, certificate expiry and a test query, with uptime history over days and months and failures raised through the existing alarms. Checks are planned to run from the host agents, so the record keeps going while the centre is offline.

  • Proxmox VE migration

    Import VMs from a Proxmox VE cluster into Hyper-V, through the same migration runs, scans and pre-flight checks as the VMware path.

Later

Exploring

Under consideration. Scope and order may change, and some may not happen.

  • Nutanix AHV migration

    Import VMs from Nutanix AHV via Prism Central, on the same migration machinery.

  • IP address management

    IP pools per network and VLAN for the addresses Ballast itself assigns (template deploys, management vNICs), with conflict detection before an address is used.

  • OpenShift Virtualization migration

    Import KubeVirt VMs from OpenShift. The source disks are persistent volumes rather than a classic hypervisor export, so this needs its own design.