Human readable byte sizes - Terminal - Display.Human.Readable.Sizes

Human readable byte sizes | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack puts together many technologies to make managing large datacentres and its resources easy and efficient, but with many complex systems, it is not always evident what goes on behind the scenes. CloudStack has a verbose logging system built in that you can reference if you want to know what’s happening under the hood. This feature aims to make looking through those logs better for humans. In CloudStack logs, alerts, and events, data values are displayed in bytes. When dealing with gigabytes and terabytes, these values are long strings of numbers which become ‘unreadable’ (i.e. very difficult to understand or […]

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Remote Console VMRC opening VM

noVNC Console Integration | CloudStack Feature First Look

There are a plethora of ways to connect to a remote system, from command-line based protocols like SSH, to graphical user interfaces such as RDP. One of the simplest ways to connect to the GUI of a remote system is via VNC (Virtual Network Computing), which transmits keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying screen updates back by returning a sequence of pixels which when put together produce an image or ‘frame’. Simply put, it allows one computer to delegate its GUI display to another machine for the sake of convenience. VNC is built upon the Remote […]

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Cloud Computing Service - CloudStack

Send hypervisor host name via metadata | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature allows admins to expose the hypervisor host name to a User VM instance either through Config Drive or Virtual Router, based on the user data provider chosen for the network offering on which the VM instance is deployed. To expose this information, the new Global configuration “global.allow.expose.host.hostname“ and the new Account scope configuration value “account.allow.expose.host.hostname” must be set to true. Once set, the hypervisor host name will be visible after VM creation, migration or reboot. If ConfigDrive is the user data provider, we need to firstly mount the config drive iso in the VM instance. After setting the […]

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Cloud Management - CloudStack

Enable unmanaging of guest instances | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature allows CloudStack administrators to unmanage guest virtual machines (VMs) from their CloudStack infrastructure. Once unmanaged, CloudStack can no longer monitor, control, or manage provisioning and orchestration related operations on it. This feature is currently supported only on VMware. An interesting use case of this feature (when used in conjunction with the VM ingestion feature) is being able to move guest VMs from one vCenter to another, by unmanaging it from one zone and then importing it into a different zone. It is also possible to perform any out-of-band operations on the VM (once unmanaged from CloudStack) directly through […]

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Network Image - CloudStack Feature First Look

Enable PVLAN support on L2 networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

Private VLANs have always been partially supported in CloudStack (for shared networks only), in versions prior to 4.14. Administrators could set up Isolated or Promiscuous PVLANs by creating their shared networks in which: Primary VLAN ID = secondary VLAN ID, for Promiscuous PVLANs Primary VLAN ID != secondary VLAN ID, for Isolated PVLANs CloudStack 4.14 introduces some changes in the PVLAN support, by: Extending the existing support for shared networks and L2 networks (initially supported for the VMware hypervisor when using dvSwitches) Extending the PVLAN types to Isolated, Promiscuous and Community Allowing the administrators to explicitly select the PVLAN type […]

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Direct Download png | CloudStack Feature First Look

Direct Download agnostic of the storage provider | CloudStack Feature First Look

Introduction In a previous post, ShapeBlue’s Boris Stoyanov introduced a feature for KVM which allows administrators to register templates and ISOs without needing secondary storage as an intermediate cache. This feature is known as Direct Download in CloudStack. Without an intermediate cache, the templates and ISOs direct download registration process differs from the usual process, which is: The template and ISO registration process uses secondary storage as an intermediate cache The zone SSVM handles the template or ISO download and stores it on the intermediate cache in secondary storage On VM creation, the template is copied into primary storage from […]

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VM Example - CloudStack

Enable sending of arbitrary configuration data to VMs | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature allows the sending of arbitrary additional VM configurations to user VMs on CloudStack and is supported by KVM, XenServer and VMware hypervisors. The administrator enables or disables this feature by the global configuration  ‘enable.additional.vm.configuration’ which is disabled by default. To add a second layer of security, the administrator must explicitly set a comma-separated list of allowed VM additional configurations per hypervisor that users can use. This is achieved by the following global settings: ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.kvm’ ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.vmware’ ‘allow.additional.vm.configuration.list.xen’ This means that users can send additional configuration to VMs on start or update, only if: The administrator has set the feature […]

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host maintenance - CloudStack

Hosts stuck in PrepareForMaintenance state | CloudStack Feature First Look

The process of setting a host into maintenance in CloudStack requires an administrator to ask for ‘prepare for maintenance’, either via API or through the UI on a host. When CloudStack receives the request to prepare the host for maintenance, the host state is set to ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ and any VM running on the host start to be migrated away. Ideally, the process lasts until there are no VMs left running on the host and it can safely enter Maintenance mode. However, in case of failure with these VM migrations, the host can stay indefinitely in the ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ state. This does […]

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VR Health Checks - heart check | CloudStack Feature First Look

VR Health Checks | CloudStack Feature First Look

This feature introduces an easy and integrated way to check the health of virtual routers (VRs) within CloudStack. With the help of these checks, administrators can monitor VRs and take any necessary action when a failure is reported. These health checks can be basic or advanced. Basic health checks include: Connectivity from the management server to the virtual router Connectivity from a virtual router to its interfaces’ gateways Free disk space on virtual router CPU and memory usage VR Sanity checks: SSH/dnsmasq/haproxy/httpd services running Advanced health checks include: DHCP / DNS configuration matches management server DB IPtables port forwarding rules match […]

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Direct Download png | CloudStack Feature First Look

Improvements for Template Direct Download | CloudStack Feature First Look

For some time now, CloudStack has supported the direct download of user templates for the KVM hypervisor. This basically allows user to register a template (whilst bypassing secondary storage) and directly download and install it to primary storage where it can be used for deployment: With CloudStack 4.14, this has been improved by adding direct download support for system VM templates. Previously, administrators could register new system VM templates with the direct download flag, but this flag was not honoured and there would be a failure during system VM deployment. Now, an administrator can register a new system VM template […]

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