Entries by Nicolas Vazquez

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Adding Comments to CloudStack Objects | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack administrators are currently able to add annotations/comments on hosts, domains or virtual machines. This is useful as administrators may comment on the actions taken on those entities, allowing other administrators to know why actions were taken. This new functionality (available from CloudStack version 4.16.0 onwards) extends the scope of the comments feature to users, domain administrators and administrators, allowing them to add comments on most CloudStack objects (that have a UUID): User VMs (existing) Domains (existing) Hosts (existing) Instance groups SSH keypairs Kubernetes Clusters Volumes Snapshots VM Snapshots Networks VPCs Public IP addresses VPN customer gateways Templates ISOs Service […]

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Support Virtual Appliance OVA Templates in VMware | CloudStack Deep Dive

Vendors of virtual appliances (vApp) for VMware often produce ‘templates’ of their appliances in an OVA format. An OVA file will contain disc images, configuration data of the virtual appliance, and sometimes a EULA which must be acknowledged. The purpose of this feature is to enable CloudStack to mimic the end-user experience of importing such an OVA directly into vCenter, the end result being a virtual appliance deployed with the same configuration data in the virtual machines descriptor (VMX) file as would be there if the appliance had been deployed directly through vCenter. The OVA will contain configuration data regarding […]

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Share ISO from UI | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack supports sharing templates and ISOs between accounts and projects through the API ‘updateTemplatePermissions’ and sharing templates through the UI. However, prior to version 4.15, it was not possible to share ISOs from the UI. This feature introduces support for sharing ISOs through different accounts and / or projects via the UI. With this feature, a user or administrator must be able to update the permissions for an ISO via API and UI, being able to: Share the ISO with another account Share the ISO with another project Revoke the access to the ISO for an account Revoke the access […]

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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 feature) is being able to move guest VMs from one vCenter to another, by unmanaging it from one zone and then importing it into a different zone. It is also possible to perform any out-of-band operations on the VM (once unmanaged from CloudStack) directly through […]

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Enable PVLAN support on L2 networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

Private VLANs have always been partially supported in CloudStack (for shared networks only), in versions prior to 4.14. Administrators could set up Isolated or Promiscuous PVLANs by creating their shared networks in which: Primary VLAN ID = secondary VLAN ID, for Promiscuous PVLANs Primary VLAN ID != secondary VLAN ID, for Isolated PVLANs CloudStack 4.14 introduces some changes in the PVLAN support, by: Extending the existing support for shared networks and L2 networks (initially supported for the VMware hypervisor when using dvSwitches) Extending the PVLAN types to Isolated, Promiscuous and Community Allowing the administrators to explicitly select the PVLAN type […]

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Direct Download agnostic of the storage provider | CloudStack Feature First Look

Introduction In a previous post, ShapeBlue’s Boris Stoyanov introduced a feature for KVM which allows administrators to register templates and ISOs without needing secondary storage as an intermediate cache. This feature is known as Direct Download in CloudStack. Without an intermediate cache, the templates and ISOs direct download registration process differs from the usual process, which is: The template and ISO registration process uses secondary storage as an intermediate cache The zone SSVM handles the template or ISO download and stores it on the intermediate cache in secondary storage On VM creation, the template is copied into primary storage from […]

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Enable sending of arbitrary configuration data to VMs | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature allows the sending of arbitrary additional VM configurations to user VMs on CloudStack and is supported by KVM, XenServer and VMware hypervisors. The administrator enables or disables this feature by the global configuration  ‘enable.additional.vm.configuration’ which is disabled by default. To add a second layer of security, the administrator must explicitly set a comma-separated list of allowed VM additional configurations per hypervisor that users can use. This is achieved by the following global settings: ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.kvm’ ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.vmware’ ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.xen’ This means that users can send additional configuration to VMs on start or update, only if: The administrator has set the feature […]

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Hosts stuck in PrepareForMaintenance state | CloudStack Feature First Look

The process of setting a host into maintenance in CloudStack requires an administrator to ask for ‘prepare for maintenance’, either via API or through the UI on a host. When CloudStack receives the request to prepare the host for maintenance, the host state is set to ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ and any VM running on the host start to be migrated away. Ideally, the process lasts until there are no VMs left running on the host and it can safely enter Maintenance mode. However, in case of failure with these VM migrations, the host can stay indefinitely in the ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ state. This does […]

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VR Health Checks | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature introduces an easy and integrated way to check the health of virtual routers (VRs) within CloudStack. With the help of these checks, administrators can monitor VRs and take any necessary action when a failure is reported. These health checks can be basic or advanced. Basic health checks include: Connectivity from the management server to the virtual router Connectivity from a virtual router to its interfaces’ gateways Free disk space on virtual router CPU and memory usage VR Sanity checks: SSH/dnsmasq/haproxy/httpd services running Advanced health checks include: DHCP / DNS configuration matches management server DB IPtables port forwarding rules match […]

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Openvswitch with DPDK support on CloudStack – Part 2 | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive

Introduction In my previous post, I described the new ‘Open vSwitch with DPDK support’ on CloudStack for KVM hosts. There, I focused on describing the feature, as it was new to CloudStack, and also explained the necessary configuration on the KVM agents’ side to enable DPDK support. DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) (https://www.dpdk.org/) is a set of libraries and NIC drivers for fast package processing in userspace. Using DPDK along with OVS brings benefits to networking performance on VMs and networking appliances. DPDK support in CloudStack requires that the KVM hypervisor is running on DPDK compatible hardware. In this post, […]

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