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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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Cloud Management - CloudStack

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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KVM Rolling Maintenance | CloudStack Feature First Look

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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CloudStack Primate Dashboard | New UI

Project Primate – a new UI for Apache CloudStack

There is currently significant effort going on in the Apache CloudStack community to develop a new, modern, UI (user interface) for CloudStack: Project Primate. In this article, I discuss why this new UI is required, the history of this project and how it will be included in future CloudStack releases. There are a number of key dates that current users of CloudStack should take note of and plan for, which are listed towards the end of this article.   We also recently held a webinar on this subject:   The current CloudStack UI The current UI for Apache CloudStack was […]

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At Africacom with Netapp Solidfire | Case Studies

ShapeBlue recently attended the AfricaCom show in Cape Town, South Africa.  We had an excellent opportunity to catch up with a number of our clients and partners and listened to a number of storage challenges being faced by the industry.  We captured some of these thoughts, and also got some updates from our partner NetApp SolidFire in this short video.

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