Introduction Apache CloudStack has always been easier to upgrade than many of its competitors, but a common pain point is that when a new release of Apache CloudStack is deployed, the operations team must organize maintenance windows to allow the redeployment of every customer’s VR. Depending on the number of existing networks, planning and execution can be time-consuming, especially in cases of mission-critical customer services, often requiring scheduling of the VR upgrade on a case-by-case basis. Also, to a much lesser extent, when upgrading system VMs, secondary storage-related and proxy console services have some downtime. With this new feature, the […]

Introduction Apache CloudStack Service Offerings are sets of capabilities that a CloudStack admin makes available to users, defining Instance, Volume and Network specifications to be consumed by users when creating their resources. Previously, when users deployed a new Instance, the Root Volume definition was included in the Compute Offering, including disk size, IOPS and storage tags. This behaviour is a limitation when users try to change the Instance Root Volume characteristics, as it is a part of the Compute Offering, used alongside the Instance. To address this behaviour, Root Volume specifications have been decoupled from the Compute Offerings. This new […]

Overview In CloudStack 4.17 a brief overview of the status of various services can be retrieved. This includes information on the Management Server(s), the Database and the Usage server. This is a quick overview for operators. It does not replace a full-fletched monitoring system. Use Case It is now possible, within the Apache CloudStack, to know the status of its management infrastructure. The status should indicate which management servers are up, their memory, CPU use, internal telemetry such as workers in use, JVM memory use, the ‘health of MySQL host(s)’ etc. Of course, further enhancements and configurability is possible, but […]

Migration of resources such as virtual machines and volumes is essential functionality for cloud operators, enabling them to load balance or perform maintenance operations on underlying compute, storage or network resources without major downtime. CloudStack provides impressive functionality to migrate VMs and volumes, with different APIs for different use-cases: migrateVirtualMachine migrateVirtualMachineWithVolume migrateSystemVm migrateVolume Most of these actions are also available in the CloudStack UI, which makes life easier when there are not many migrations to be carried out at once. Keeping with this notion of making life easier, the next CloudStack LTS version will come with improvements to VM and […]

When upgrading Apache CloudStack (ACS) to a newer version one must manually register new SystemVM templates before upgrading the packages. Failing to do so means having to roll back the database to the previous version, register the new template and start the upgrade again. We’ve developed a process (available as of CloudStack 4.16.0) to automate SystemVM template registration at the point the packages are upgraded (if not already registered). Manual SystemVM template registration will still be supported, but not mandatory. Instead, if you update the link to the packages (eg. /etc/yum.repos.d/cloudstack.repo on a RHEL based system), and run the command […]