Custom Resource Icons - CloudStack

Support for Custom Resource Icons in CloudStack | CloudStack Feature First Look

A CloudStack resource is typically identified by its name or description, and when creating and managing resources, zones are often named by their geographical location, team/company name for domains, accounts, projects and so on. However, as icons and images are generally easier to quickly identify we wanted to improve the user experience by providing the ability to create custom icons for resources. Support for custom icons has been provided to a subset of resources including: • Zones • Templates / ISOs • Virtual Machines (if no icon of its own, will inherit the respective template / ISO icon) • Accounts […]

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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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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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Who’s building Clouds?

Who would build their own Cloud in 2012? Giles Sirett, Managing Partner of ShapeBlue gives his view of who’s currently building cloud infrastructures. Cloud delivery had been one of the major drivers in the consumerisation of IT and it’s evolution into a utility Services model. So, why would organisations want to build their own cloud? If they can purchase key services or infrastructure as utility from major vendors such as Amazon or Rackspace, then why continue to manage their own infrastructure? And why add complexity develop that infrastructure further into a cloud model instead of a traditional virtualised DC model […]

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