Entries by Abhishek Kumar

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Improvements to VM and Volume Migration | CloudStack Feature First Look

Migration of resources such as virtual machines and volumes is essential functionality for cloud operators, enabling them to load balance or perform maintenance operations on underlying compute, storage or network resources without major downtime. CloudStack provides impressive functionality to migrate VMs and volumes, with different APIs for different use-cases: migrateVirtualMachine migrateVirtualMachineWithVolume migrateSystemVm migrateVolume Most of these actions are also available in the CloudStack UI, which makes life easier when there are not many migrations to be carried out at once. Keeping with this notion of making life easier, the next CloudStack LTS version will come with improvements to VM and […]

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Import Virtual Machines in CloudStack

Since CloudStack 4.14 it has been possible to import virtual machines (VMs) from a vSphere cluster directly into CloudStack, which introduced the concept of managed and unmanaged VMs. Managed VMs are those controlled by CloudStack, whereas unmanaged VMs have been either deployed directly on the hypervisor or removed from CloudStack (using the unmanageVirtualMachine API). To work with these unmanaged and managed VMs the following APIs are available, but there was no support in the UI: listUnmanagedInstances: list all unmanaged VMs (for a vSphere cluster) importUnmanagedInstance: import an unmanaged VM (from vSphere cluster) into CloudStack With the next LTS release of […]

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Customising the CloudStack UI

A lot of work has gone into the CloudStack UI recently, and it is now a modern, role-based UI that not only gives a fresh look to CloudStack but also makes development and customisation much easier. In this blog, I provide guidance on how to customise the UI, and have classified customisation into two categories – basic and advanced. Basic Customisations Users can customise the UI by means of this configuration file: /etc/cloudstack/management/config.json to modify theme, logos, etc. as required. These changes can be made while the CloudStack management server is running, and the changes can be seen immediately with […]

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XCP-ng 8.2 LTS Support Added to CloudStack

The latest version of XCP-ng – the opensource hypervisor based on XenServer – XCP-ng 8.2 was released in November 2020, and is the first long term support (LTS) version. As such it will receive support and updates for the next 5 years compared to only a year for a standard XCP release. The hypervisor is getting more and more popular in the open-source world thanks to its modern and user-friendly UI, scalability, live migration capabilities and security level. XCP-ng 8.2 comes with a wide range of new capabilities including UEFI support, openflow controller access, native support for Gluster, ZFS, XFS, […]

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VMware Migration Improvements | CloudStack Feature First Look

Migration of virtual machines between physical hosts or clusters is essential for cloud operators, allowing them to perform maintenance with little or no downtime, or balance compute and storage resources when necessary. CloudStack supports both live and cold migration (if supported by the hypervisor), and most hypervisors allow VM and volume migration in some form or another. VMware vMotion provides both live and cold migration of VM and volumes. By leveraging vMotion with the APIs migrateVirtualMachine, migrateVirtualMachineWithVolume, migrateSystemVm and migrateVolume, migration of user and system VMs and their volume(s) can be performed easily in CloudStack. However, until now CloudStack had […]

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CentOS 8 Support | | CloudStack Feature First Look

As of 2021, CentOS 7 will be receiving maintenance updates only, and is end of life in 2024. Considering this, it is important that CloudStack supports CentOS 8 as a KVM hypervisor host and as a host for the management and usage servers. This support has been developed and will be included as of CloudStack 4.15. CentOS 8 uses a more recent QEMU version, Python 3 by default and deprecates several networking tools (such as bridge-utils), therefore a number of changes have been made: Python scripts related to setting up of management and usage servers and KVM agent have been […]

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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 the addHost API / UI. With guest OS mappings added for XCP-ng 8.x, once added all VM operations can be performed on such hosts just like any older XCP-ng hosts unless they are functionally not available on XCP-ng 8.x. It should be noted that with […]

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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 integration to CloudStack – allowing users to run containerized services using Kubernetes clusters through CloudStack. CKS adds several new APIs (and updates to the UI) to provision Kubernetes clusters with minimal configuration by the user. It also provides the ability to add and manage different […]

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Improvements for Template Direct Download | CloudStack Feature First Look

For some time now, CloudStack has supported the direct download of user templates for the KVM hypervisor. This basically allows user to register a template (whilst bypassing secondary storage) and directly download and install it to primary storage where it can be used for deployment: With CloudStack 4.14, this has been improved by adding direct download support for system VM templates. Previously, administrators could register new system VM templates with the direct download flag, but this flag was not honoured and there would be a failure during system VM deployment. Now, an administrator can register a new system VM template […]

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VM Ingestion | CloudStack Feature First Look

Apache CloudStack has proved itself to be a great cloud orchestrator and is probably one of the best open-source platforms available for deployment of new IaaS environments. However, until now there has been little or no support for importing an existing cloud environment with all its resources and entities into CloudStack. This is going to change with new release CloudStack 4.14 which will include a new feature allowing the import of existing virtual machines (VMs) into a cloud environment. With CloudStack 4.14 new APIs have been added to list and import unmanaged VMs. Currently, this support is only available for […]

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