Hybrid Enterprise IaaS Cloud – What you need to know

3rd July – Johannesburg 4th July –  Cape Town   Cloud computing models are well established and here to stay. Many organizations in South Africa face the challenge of needing to update legacy systems and practices to keep pace with customer and partner expectations, but have existing investments in technology and skillsets. How to remain […]

CloudStack global settings with VMware

In this article, Paul Angus Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue looks into a few interesting settings when using CloudStack to orchestrate VMware environments Working with CloudStack 4.3 and VMware 5.5 in our lab recently, I came to using some very interesting global settings which renewed a project I had on the back burner… vm.instancename.flag This global […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Apache CloudStack enables existing VMware users and gives an easy way for service providers to migrate to a fully open-source solution and eliminate vendor dependency.