VMware Migration Improvements | CloudStack Feature First Look

Migration of virtual machines between physical hosts or clusters is essential for cloud operators, allowing them to perform maintenance with little or no downtime, or balance compute and storage resources when necessary. CloudStack supports both live and cold migration (if supported by the hypervisor), and most hypervisors allow VM and volume migration in some form or another. VMware vMotion provides both live and cold migration of VM and volumes. By leveraging vMotion with the APIs migrateVirtualMachine, migrateVirtualMachineWithVolume, migrateSystemVm and migrateVolume, migration of user and system VMs and their volume(s) can be performed easily in CloudStack. However, until now CloudStack had […]

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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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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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vSphere Advanced Capabilities in CloudStack | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive

Introduction CloudStack vSphere integration has not kept up with the evolution of vSphere itself, and several functions can be performed natively by vSphere much more efficiently than by CloudStack. vSphere also has additional features which would be beneficial to the operators of vSphere based CloudStack clouds. This feature introduces support in CloudStack for VMFS6, vSAN, vVols and datastore clusters. Also, vSphere storage policies are tied with compute and disk offerings to improve linking offerings with storages, and CloudStack will allow inter-cluster VM and volume migrations, meaning that running VMs can now migrate along with all volumes across clusters. Furthermore, storage […]

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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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CentOS 8 Support | | CloudStack Feature First Look

As of 2021, CentOS 7 will be receiving maintenance updates only, and is end of life in 2024. Considering this, it is important that CloudStack supports CentOS 8 as a KVM hypervisor host and as a host for the management and usage servers. This support has been developed and will be included as of CloudStack 4.15. CentOS 8 uses a more recent QEMU version, Python 3 by default and deprecates several networking tools (such as bridge-utils), therefore a number of changes have been made: Python scripts related to setting up of management and usage servers and KVM agent have been […]

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noVNC Console Integration | CloudStack Feature First Look

There are a plethora of ways to connect to a remote system, from command-line based protocols like SSH, to graphical user interfaces such as RDP. One of the simplest ways to connect to the GUI of a remote system is via VNC (Virtual Network Computing), which transmits keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying screen updates back by returning a sequence of pixels which when put together produce an image or ‘frame’. Simply put, it allows one computer to delegate its GUI display to another machine for the sake of convenience. VNC is built upon the Remote […]

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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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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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Machine Learning and Apache CloudStack | Case Studies

Introduction In this blog we discuss applications of machine learning (ML) in datacenters and how that might integrate with Apache CloudStack (ACS). We also try to identify various places in the lifecycle of datacentres where such tools can be helpful. With any datacentre deployment, the primary goal is to achieve efficient resource provisioning whilst also maintaining performance and availability. Datacentres have become complex and multidimensional, both in terms of software and hardware, and we should also consider a hybrid hosting character. Maintaining an optimal deployment with minimal downtime is consequently becoming more challenging with manual operations. Recent trends show some […]

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