Entries by Abhishek Kumar

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Visual Resource Metrics I CloudStack Feature First Look

Introduction Viewing historical resource consumption data helps cloud users and operators to easily identify bottlenecks or the over-provision of resources, allowing resource owners to estimate and analyse performance. CloudStack already allows for retrieval of metrics data for various resources (eg. Zones, Hosts) and for Instances and their Volumes, but does not display the data in a simple graph. This improvement expands the available historical metrics data to include user Instances, system VMs and Volumes. Furthermore, a Metrics tab has been added for each of these resources where users can see the data in multiple, interactive graphs. With this improvement, cloud […]

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Edge Zones l CloudStack Feature Deep Dive

Introduction Edge computing is the talk of the town these days. With the impetus on lowering infrastructure costs, concerns about data protection policies and efforts to provide lower latency and better services to the end-users, edge computing have been gaining traction with cloud providers. With the release of version 4.18, CloudStack is also taking a step in this direction by facilitating edge computing with the introduction of CloudStack Edge Zones with the KVM hypervisor. Edge Zones are lightweight, low-cost zones designed for edge sites. Typically, such zones contain a single hypervisor host located closer to both the data source and […]

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IPv6 Support for Isolated and VPC Networks l CloudStack Feature First Look

The IPv6 protocol is a much-needed next step in the world of the Internet and networking in general. With the depletion of publicly routable IPv4 addresses, most providers will need to switch to IPv6, which not only provides a much bigger address space but also offers many other advantages over IPv4, such as improved security, efficient routing, better QoS, etc. For a long time, Apache CloudStack has offered IPv6 support solely for Shared Networks. This will change with Apache CloudStack 4.17.0 LTS, which will add IPv6 support for isolated networks and VPCs making it possible for users to deploy dual […]

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Structured System Events l CloudStack Feature First Look

The events notification framework is a key component of Apache CloudStack, facilitating traceability of operations, and enabling cloud operators to automate tasks which may otherwise require admin intervention at regular intervals. Though quite useful, events in CloudStack had a major inconsistency regarding information of the resource (ie. Instances, Templates, Volumes, Networks, Accounts, etc.). To identify the resource in question, one had to refer to the Event description which may contain resource UUID or internal database ID. This made tracking resource operations difficult and also made automation difficult as the administrator would have to parse event description strings (which are not […]

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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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