Support for XCP-ng 8.x | CloudStack Feature First Look
XCP-ng (an open-source hypervisor based on XenServer) has been supported in CloudStack for some time, and support for XCP-ng 8.x will be available from CloudStack 4.15. From an operational perspective, there is no visible change in the UI or API – XCP-ng 8.x hosts can be added to CloudStack during zone deployment or by using […]
Secondary Storage Management | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
In CloudStack, secondary storage pools (image stores) house resources such as volumes, snapshots and templates. Over time these storage pools may have to be decommissioned or data moved from one storage pool to another, but CloudStack isn’t too evolved when it comes to managing secondary storage pools. This feature improves CloudStack’s management of secondary storage […]
Boot into Hardware Setup | CloudStack Feature First Look
Users and administrators sometimes need to change the boot order of a virtual machine (VM) so that they can (for example) force a VM to boot from an ISO. However, sometimes the proxied console session does not appear until after the opportunity to enter the BIOS menu has passed. This feature allows an admin to […]
Human readable byte sizes | CloudStack Feature First Look
CloudStack puts together many technologies to make managing large datacentres and its resources easy and efficient, but with many complex systems, it is not always evident what goes on behind the scenes. CloudStack has a verbose logging system built in that you can reference if you want to know what’s happening under the hood. This […]
Send hypervisor host name via metadata | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows admins to expose the hypervisor host name to a User VM instance either through Config Drive or Virtual Router, based on the user data provider chosen for the network offering on which the VM instance is deployed. To expose this information, the new Global configuration “global.allow.expose.host.hostname“ and the new Account scope configuration […]
CloudStack Kubernetes Service
For a while, the CloudStack community has been working on adding support for containers. ShapeBlue successfully implemented the CloudStack Container Service and donated it to the project in 2016, but it was not completely integrated into the codebase. However, with the recent CloudStack 4.14 LTS release, the CloudStack Kubernetes Service (CKS) plugin adds full Kubernetes […]
Enable unmanaging of guest instances | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows CloudStack administrators to unmanage guest virtual machines (VMs) from their CloudStack infrastructure. Once unmanaged, CloudStack can no longer monitor, control, or manage provisioning and orchestration related operations on it. This feature is currently supported only on VMware. An interesting use case of this feature (when used in conjunction with the VM ingestion […]
KVM Rolling Maintenance | CloudStack Feature First Look
In a typical scenario prior to this feature, the administrator had to automate the process of setting hosts in maintenance before upgrading, usually using external automation tools. This feature allows administrators to perform the entire process within CloudStack, providing a flexible framework that allows defining custom scripts to execute on each host. CloudStack executes these scripts […]
Project Primate – a new UI for Apache CloudStack
There is currently significant effort going on in the Apache CloudStack community to develop a new, modern, UI (user interface) for CloudStack: Project Primate. In this article, I discuss why this new UI is required, the history of this project and how it will be included in future CloudStack releases. There are a number of […]
At Africacom with Netapp Solidfire | Case Studies
ShapeBlue recently attended the AfricaCom show in Cape Town, South Africa. We had an excellent opportunity to catch up with a number of our clients and partners and listened to a number of storage challenges being faced by the industry. We captured some of these thoughts, and also got some updates from our partner NetApp […]
