Kubernetes Logo - CloudStack

CloudStack Kubernetes Service – Cluster Auto-scaling | CloudStack Feature First Look

Since the addition of CloudStack Kubernetes Service, users can deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters in CloudStack. This not only makes CloudStack a more versatile and multifaceted application, but also reduces the gap between virtualization and containerization. As with any step in the right direction, it came with a few challenges, and one of them was manual scaling of the cluster. Automating this process by monitoring cluster metrics may address this issue, but Kubernetes strongly advises against this. Instead, it is recommended that Kubernetes itself make these scaling decisions, and specifically for , Kubernetes has the ‘Cluster Autoscaler’ feature – a […]

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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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Role Based Users in Projects - Add Account to Project

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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Dynamic Roles Utility - Add Account

Dynamic Roles Utility | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack has more than 600 APIs which can be allowed / disallowed in different combinations to create dynamic roles for the users. The aim of this feature is more effective use and management of these dynamic roles, allowing CloudStack users and operators to: Import and export roles (rule definitions) for the purpose of sharing. Create a new role from an existing role (clone and rename) to create a slightly different role. Use additional built-in roles (to quickly create read-only and support users and operators), such as: Read-Only Admin role: an admin role in which an account is only allowed to […]

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Support for XCP-ng 8.x - CloudStack Feature First Look

Support for XCP-ng 8.x | CloudStack Feature First Look

XCP-ng (an open-source hypervisor based on XenServer) has been supported in CloudStack for some time, and support for XCP-ng 8.x will be available from CloudStack 4.15. From an operational perspective, there is no visible change in the UI or API – XCP-ng 8.x hosts can be added to CloudStack during zone deployment or by using the addHost API / UI. With guest OS mappings added for XCP-ng 8.x, once added all VM operations can be performed on such hosts just like any older XCP-ng hosts unless they are functionally not available on XCP-ng 8.x. It should be noted that with […]

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Secondary Storage Management - Data Store - CloudStack

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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Boot Into Hardware Setup

Boot into Hardware Setup | CloudStack Feature First Look

Users and administrators sometimes need to change the boot order of a virtual machine (VM) so that they can (for example) force a VM to boot from an ISO. However, sometimes the proxied console session does not appear until after the opportunity to enter the BIOS menu has passed. This feature allows an admin to request that a VM boots into the BIOS or other hardware setup screen rather than into the operating system (OS). The nature of the setup depends on the underlying hardware version and the OS of the virtual machine, and can be BIOS or UEFI. This […]

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Human readable byte sizes - Terminal - Display.Human.Readable.Sizes

Human readable byte sizes | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack puts together many technologies to make managing large datacentres and its resources easy and efficient, but with many complex systems, it is not always evident what goes on behind the scenes. CloudStack has a verbose logging system built in that you can reference if you want to know what’s happening under the hood. This feature aims to make looking through those logs better for humans. In CloudStack logs, alerts, and events, data values are displayed in bytes. When dealing with gigabytes and terabytes, these values are long strings of numbers which become ‘unreadable’ (i.e. very difficult to understand or […]

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Cloud Computing Service - CloudStack

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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Kubernetes Logo

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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