Entries by Pearl d'Silva

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System VM and Virtual Router Zero Downtime Upgrade l CloudStack Feature First Look

Introduction Apache CloudStack has always been easier to upgrade than many of its competitors, but a common pain point is that when a new release of Apache CloudStack is deployed, the operations team must organize maintenance windows to allow the redeployment of every customer’s VR. Depending on the number of existing networks, planning and execution can be time-consuming, especially in cases of mission-critical customer services, often requiring scheduling of the VR upgrade on a case-by-case basis. Also, to a much lesser extent, when upgrading system VMs, secondary storage-related and proxy console services have some downtime. With this new feature, the […]

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SystemVM template – Upgrade Improvements

When upgrading Apache CloudStack (ACS) to a newer version one must manually register new SystemVM templates before upgrading the packages. Failing to do so means having to roll back the database to the previous version, register the new template and start the upgrade again. We’ve developed a process (available as of CloudStack 4.16.0) to automate SystemVM template registration at the point the packages are upgraded (if not already registered). Manual SystemVM template registration will still be supported, but not mandatory. Instead, if you update the link to the packages (eg. /etc/yum.repos.d/cloudstack.repo on a RHEL based system), and run the command […]

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Support for Custom Resource Icons in CloudStack | CloudStack Feature First Look

A CloudStack resource is typically identified by its name or description, and when creating and managing resources, zones are often named by their geographical location, team/company name for domains, accounts, projects and so on. However, as icons and images are generally easier to quickly identify we wanted to improve the user experience by providing the ability to create custom icons for resources. Support for custom icons has been provided to a subset of resources including: • Zones • Templates / ISOs • Virtual Machines (if no icon of its own, will inherit the respective template / ISO icon) • Accounts […]

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Enable Bulk Actions via the CloudStack UI

Want to start or stop a VM (Virtual Machine), or delete an offering in CloudStack? No big deal. However – what if you need to delete 20 offerings, or stop 20 VMs? Having to perform the same operation on each individual item is time-consuming, laborious and can be frustrating. Bearing this in mind, we’ve come up with a nice little enhancement to improve the user experience by making it possible to perform bulk operations via the UI. Various views in the UI can already show checkboxes against items (such as VMs, events and alerts) making it easier for users to […]

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L2 Persistent Networks and enhancement of Isolated Persistent Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

When a network is created in CloudStack, it is by default not provisioned until the first VM is deployed on that network, at which point a a VLAN ID is assigned. Until then, the network exists only as a database entry. If you wanted to create and provision a network without deploying any VMs, you would need to create a persistent network. With persistent networks, you can deploy physical devices like routers / switches, etc. without having to deploy VMs on it, as it provisions the network at the time of its creation. More information about persistent networks in CloudStack […]

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Specify VR IP in Shared Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

If you are a system engineer managing shared networks and deploying virtual machines with CloudStack, you should be aware that currently there is no option to assign a specific IP address for the Virtual Router. The router is assigned the first free IP address. For many engineers, this might be annoying, as you are not able to make the selection by yourself. Moreover, you would prefer to hold the inventory under control and select the IP address to be assigned by yourself. In this article, we present a new feature in CloudStack, which make the management of shared networks easier. […]

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Debian replaces CoreOS as CKS template | CloudStack Feature First Look

The CloudStack Kubernetes Services (CKS) uses CoreOS templates to deploy Kubernetes clusters. However, as CoreOS reached EOL on May 26th, 2020 we needed to find a suitable replacement meeting the requirements of resilience, security, and popularity in the community. Keeping these requirements in mind, we have chosen to modify the existing Debian-based SystemVM template so it can also be used by CKS instead of CoreOS. Before coming to this decision, we considered other operating systems, such as FlatCar Linux, Alpine Linux and Debian, and based our decision on the following parameters:   FlatCar Linux Alpine Linux Debian Brief Description Drop-in […]

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Role Based Users in Projects | CloudStack Feature First Look

Projects have proven to be a boon in organizing and grouping accounts and resources together, giving users in the same domain the ability to collaborate and share resources such as VMs, snapshots, volumes and IP addresses. However, there is a limitation. Only accounts can be added as members to projects, which can be an issue if we only want to add a single user of an account to a project. To address this, we’ve enhanced the way project membership is handled to facilitate addition of individual users. Adding users to projects and assigning project-level roles In order to restrict users […]

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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 by introducing the following functionality: Balanced / Complete migration of data objects among secondary storage pools Enable setting image stores to read-only (making further operations such as download of templates or storage of snapshots and volumes impossible) Algorithm to automatically balance image stores View download […]

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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 value “account.allow.expose.host.hostname” must be set to true. Once set, the hypervisor host name will be visible after VM creation, migration or reboot. If ConfigDrive is the user data provider, we need to firstly mount the config drive iso in the VM instance. After setting the […]

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