Entries by Andrija Panic

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How-to-Guide: Migrating to Apache CloudStack from Rovius/CloudPlatform

In recent years, we’ve seen many companies upgrading from Accelerite Cloud Platform (Rovius) and its predecessor Citrix CloudPlatform (which were both single-vendor, commercial products based on Apache CloudStack) to Apache CloudStack itself. Some of the drivers behind their decision are the product stability that a large, global open-source community brings to avoid vendor lock-in and the flexibility of a real open-source solution. In addition, they strive to achieve cost efficiency and improved security and compliance. Last but not least, companies often have specific requirements for their cloud infrastructure and services, which is much easier to accomplish with an open-source platform. […]

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Changing Ceph Monitor IP/FQDN in CloudStack

In the last few years, we’ve observed more and more KVM customers using software-defined storage solutions, especially Ceph. Frequently, deployments would start small and then grow over time. This is true for both CloudStack and Ceph which is used as Primary Storage for VMs. Over time, we’ve seen more frequent customer requests to change Ceph monitor IP/FQDN in CloudStack. Whether it’s for maintenance reasons, or to grow the Ceph deployment – people would be adding/moving Ceph monitors, moving from IP to FQDN, etc. Below we’ll describe a procedure for changing the Ceph monitor configuration in a running CloudStack deployment. Due […]

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Changing from Cluster-wide to Zone-wide Storage

Historically, all Primary Storage Pools inside CloudStack were Cluster-wide. Each Pool was “dedicated” to one cluster only – or in other words, only hosts in one cluster could access/use that Primary Storage Pool. This was an inheritance of the traditional storage implementations in various hypervisors – i.e. a Datastore in vSphere mounted on hosts in one cluster, or a Storage Repository mounted on hosts in a single XenServer cluster, etc. Over the years, different storage solutions appeared and support for those has changed in the hypervisor world. For some of them, it made sense to ensure that multiple clusters can […]

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ShapeBlue Advisory on Libvirt 8+ Compatibility Issues with CloudStack

Overview As of the 4.15 release, CloudStack has supported various EL8 operating systems / hypervisors, namely RHEL 8, CentOS 8, Rocky Linux 8 (and in theory – as of CloudStack 4.16 – all other EL8 variants including e.g. Alma Linux 8) – for both management servers and hypervisors. Similarly, support for Ubuntu 20.04 was added as of CloudStack 4.15, and OpenSUSE as of 4.16. All these Linux systems worked fine as hypervisors, until libvirt was upgraded to version 8+. Effects on CloudStack Historically, CloudStack used to set 22-character VNC passwords for KVM Virtual Machines, and libvirt was silently trimming it […]

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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 within the context of 4 stages: Pre-flight script runs on hosts before commencing the rolling maintenance. If pre-flight check scripts return an error from any host, then rolling maintenance will be cancelled with no actions taken, and an error returned. If there are no pre-flight […]

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SolidFire with CloudStack

Aside from traditional storage solutions, CloudStack has supported managed storage for some time. In this article, we will touch on SolidFire support in CloudStack 4.13 and lay out the exact steps needed to add SolidFire to CloudStack as Primary Storage (for VMware, KVM and XenServer). We will also explain the difference between the “SolidFire” and “SolidFireShared” plugins and discuss their use cases. There will be a follow up article covering different feature sets that different hypervisors have when it comes to using SolidFire as Primary Storage, and we’ll also examine the way things work under the hood. SolidFire 101 SolidFire […]

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Ceph and CloudStack – Part 3

Introduction In the previous two parts of this article series, we have covered the complete Ceph installation process and implemented Ceph as an additional Primary Storage in CloudStack. In this final part, I will show you some examples of working with RBD images, and will cover some Ceph specifics, both in general and related to the CloudStack. RBD image manipulations In case you need to do some low-level client support, you can even try to mount that image as the local disk on any KVM (or Ceph) node. For this purpose, we use a tool, conveniently named, “rbd”, which is […]

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Ceph and CloudStack – Part 2

In the previous article we covered some basics around Ceph and deployed a working Ceph cluster. In this article, we are going to finish the Ceph configuration needed for CloudStack and add it as a new Primary Storage pool. We are also going to deploy Ceph volumes via CloudStack and examine them. Finally, in part 3 (to be published soon), I will show you some examples of working with RBD images and will cover some Ceph specifics, both in general and related to the CloudStack. Before proceeding with the actual work, let me first mention that CloudStack supports Ceph with […]

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Ceph and CloudStack – Part 1

As well as NFS and various block storage solutions for Primary Storage, CloudStack has supported Ceph with KVM for a number of years now. Thanks to some great Ceph users in the community lots of previously missing CloudStack storage features have been implemented for Ceph (and lots of bugs squashed), making it the perfect choice for CloudStack if you are looking for easy scaling of storage and decent performance. In this and my next article, I am going to cover all steps needed to actually install a Ceph cluster from scratch, and subsequently add it to CloudStack. In this article I […]

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One month at ShapeBlue l Meet The Team

Andrija Panic shares some thoughts on joining the ShapeBlue team Hi there, this is Andrija from… well, ShapeBlue! I’ve been working here for a month now and I thought that I’d share my views of working for the company. Before I move to the actual topic, let me share just a little bit of background about myself. Before joining ShapeBlue, I was working as a Cloud System Engineer for two different Swiss-based Public Cloud providers, both utilizing CloudStack to provide IaaS services for local (Swiss) and international customers – many of which (as you can probably guess) were serious financial […]

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