VMware Migration Improvements - CloudStack Feature First Look - Cover

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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Shared Networks - How to specify VR - CloudStack

Specify VR IP in Shared Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

If you are a system engineer managing shared networks and deploying virtual machines with CloudStack, you should be aware that currently there is no option to assign a specific IP address for the Virtual Router. The router is assigned the first free IP address. For many engineers, this might be annoying, as you are not able to make the selection by yourself. Moreover, you would prefer to hold the inventory under control and select the IP address to be assigned by yourself. In this article, we present a new feature in CloudStack, which make the management of shared networks easier. […]

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Debian logo - CloudStack

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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Role Based Users in Projects - Add Account to Project

Role Based Users in Projects | CloudStack Feature First Look

Projects have proven to be a boon in organizing and grouping accounts and resources together, giving users in the same domain the ability to collaborate and share resources such as VMs, snapshots, volumes and IP addresses. However, there is a limitation. Only accounts can be added as members to projects, which can be an issue if we only want to add a single user of an account to a project. To address this, we’ve enhanced the way project membership is handled to facilitate addition of individual users. Adding users to projects and assigning project-level roles In order to restrict users […]

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Dynamic Roles Utility - Add Account

Dynamic Roles Utility | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack has more than 600 APIs which can be allowed / disallowed in different combinations to create dynamic roles for the users. The aim of this feature is more effective use and management of these dynamic roles, allowing CloudStack users and operators to: Import and export roles (rule definitions) for the purpose of sharing. Create a new role from an existing role (clone and rename) to create a slightly different role. Use additional built-in roles (to quickly create read-only and support users and operators), such as: Read-Only Admin role: an admin role in which an account is only allowed to […]

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Share ISO from UI - CloudStack Feature First Look - Cover

Share ISO from UI | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack supports sharing templates and ISOs between accounts and projects through the API ‘updateTemplatePermissions’ and sharing templates through the UI. However, prior to version 4.15, it was not possible to share ISOs from the UI. This feature introduces support for sharing ISOs through different accounts and / or projects via the UI. With this feature, a user or administrator must be able to update the permissions for an ISO via API and UI, being able to: Share the ISO with another account Share the ISO with another project Revoke the access to the ISO for an account Revoke the access […]

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CentOS 8 Logo - CloudStack

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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Support for XCP-ng 8.x - CloudStack Feature First Look

Support for XCP-ng 8.x | CloudStack Feature First Look

XCP-ng (an open-source hypervisor based on XenServer) has been supported in CloudStack for some time, and support for XCP-ng 8.x will be available from CloudStack 4.15. From an operational perspective, there is no visible change in the UI or API – XCP-ng 8.x hosts can be added to CloudStack during zone deployment or by using the addHost API / UI. With guest OS mappings added for XCP-ng 8.x, once added all VM operations can be performed on such hosts just like any older XCP-ng hosts unless they are functionally not available on XCP-ng 8.x. It should be noted that with […]

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Boot Into Hardware Setup

Boot into Hardware Setup | CloudStack Feature First Look

Users and administrators sometimes need to change the boot order of a virtual machine (VM) so that they can (for example) force a VM to boot from an ISO. However, sometimes the proxied console session does not appear until after the opportunity to enter the BIOS menu has passed. This feature allows an admin to request that a VM boots into the BIOS or other hardware setup screen rather than into the operating system (OS). The nature of the setup depends on the underlying hardware version and the OS of the virtual machine, and can be BIOS or UEFI. This […]

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