CloudPortal Business Manager Banner | Working with the Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1 BSS API

Working with the Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1 BSS API

Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager (CPBM) enables Enterprises and Service Providers to move towards an IT-as-a-Service model by managing and delivering a broad array of internal, external and 3rd party Cloud and IT services through a single, comprehensive, self-service portal. It also unifies and simplifies the commerce, user management, service provisioning and operational aspects of running a Cloud in a customisable user interface. The CPBM 2.1 release introduces the BSS Application Programming Interface (API) for enabling the integration of CPBM with existing business, operations and IT systems such as CRM, financials, etc. In this article Tariq Iqbal, Senior Consultant at ShapeBlue […]

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Cloud | Deploying CloudStack with Ansible

Deploying CloudStack with Ansible

In this article, Paul Angus Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue takes a look at using Ansible to Deploy an Apache CloudStack cloud. What is Ansible Ansible is a deployment and configuration management tool similar in intent to Chef and Puppet. It allows (usually) DevOps teams to orchestrate the deployment and configuration of their environments without having to re-write custom scripts to make changes. Like Chef and Puppet, Ansible is designed to be idempotent, these means that you determine the state you want a host to be in and Ansible will decide if it needs to act in order to achieve that state. […]

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Understanding CloudStack’s Physical Networking Architecture

  Understanding and configuring the physical connections of a host in a CloudStack deployment can at first be very confusing. While Software Defined Networking (SDN) is set to greatly simplify some aspects, its integration within CloudStack is not fully mature yet and it won’t be the right solution for everyone. In this article, Paul Angus, Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue, the cloud specialists, unravels some of the areas which can cause confusion in CloudStack’s physical networking architecture. Let’s Get Physical: Physical vs. Logical Hosts One source of confusion is that when people refer to a ‘host’ in the CloudStack world they […]

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Citrix CloudPlatform 3.0.4 – What’s New

  Citrix CloudPlatform is powered by Apache CloudStack, but it seems that companies who have opted to use the Citrix licensed, and therefore supported version, are getting far more bang for their buck. Citrix released v3.0.3 of CloudPlatform back at the beginning of June, and have now issued yet another update, v3.0.4, released on the 18th July. Meanwhile the Apache CloudStack version available to the OpenSource community is still at v3.0.2 The major limitation with 3.0.2 is the inability to upgrade from 2.2.x so not only are the OpenSource users not getting the new features released in 3.0.3, the majority […]

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The importance of hypervisor independence

One of the key features of CloudStack over many of it’s competitors is that it is hypervisor agnostic. I love this feature and am excited about what it offers service providers in particular. However, I recently read a post which asked the question: “you can use multiple hypervisors, so what ? what is the likely hood of somebody ACTUALLY wanting to use two different virtualization technologies within the same cloud?” This did make me stop to think for a few minutes, then I felt obliged to write this article……… One of the fundamental concepts of a cloud model is “commodity”. […]

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How to beat the VMWare Vtax.

Citrix CloudStack eases the financial impact associated with the “vTax,” the term used by many in the cloud and virtualization communities to refer to the latest update to the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that added costs to customers’ existing cloud and virtualization implementations.  Since CloudStack can support multiple hypervisors in the same cloud, VMware customers can mix and match their virtualization technologies under the same cloud environment and optimize their costs, as well as the business value. By providing a cost effective and scalable cloud platform that works with all major enterprise virtualization technologies, Citrix CloudStack allows users to […]

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