Cloud Management - CloudStack

VM Ingestion | CloudStack Feature First Look

Apache CloudStack has proved itself to be a great cloud orchestrator and is probably one of the best open-source platforms available for deployment of new IaaS environments. However, until now there has been little or no support for importing an existing cloud environment with all its resources and entities into CloudStack. This is going to change with new release CloudStack 4.14 which will include a new feature allowing the import of existing virtual machines (VMs) into a cloud environment. With CloudStack 4.14 new APIs have been added to list and import unmanaged VMs. Currently, this support is only available for […]

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board electronics computer data processing | Layer 2 Networks in CloudStack

Layer 2 Networks in CloudStack

Layer 2 (also known as the Data Link Layer) is the second in the seven-layer OSI reference model for network protocol design, and is equivalent to the link layer (the lowest layer) in the TCP/IP network model. Layer 2 is the network layer used to transfer data between adjacent network nodes in a wide area network, or between nodes on the same local area network. We have recently introduced a new Layer 2 network offering in CloudStack. This enables all network services to be provided from network equipment external to CloudStack. As a result, the Virtual Router is not required, […]

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Cloud Concept | Inter-VPC connectivity in CloudStack

CloudStack Primary Storage

Paul Angus, Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue takes an interesting look at how to separate Cloudstack’s management traffic from its primary storage traffic. I recently  looked at physical networking in a CloudStack environment and alluded to the fact that you cannot separate primary storage traffic from management traffic from CloudStack, but that it is still possible. In this article I will discuss why this is and how to do it.  In the beginning, there was primary storage The first thing to understand is the process of provisioning primary storage. When you create a primary storage pool for any given cluster, the […]

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CloudStack 4.3 – a first review

The latest release of Apache CloudStack has arrived with a raft of exciting new features. In this early review, Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue looks at the significance of some of these features and why they help to continue to position CloudStack as the IaaS orchestration platform of choice for many service providers and enterprises alike. Version 4.3 of CloudStack has been some time coming, the official release was earlier today. I count 10 headline new features, 12 improvements (not quite big enough to be called a feature) and over 160 existing issues resolved. Hyper – V Support The first, […]

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Citrix CloudPlatform 4.2 – a first review

With much fanfare, Citrix yesterday formally announced the 4.2 release of their IaaS cloud orchestration technology CloudPlatform. In parallel, the Apache Software Foundation are about to announce version 4.2 of Cloudstack. In this article, Giles Sirett CEO of ShapeBlue gives his first impressions on CloudPlatform 4.2   At ShapeBlue, we’ve had both of these technologies on the bench for some time now and wanted to share our first impressions. Built on open-source success Most people are aware that CloudPlatform is based on Apache CloudStack (“powered by” is the tagline that lets the copyright lawyers sleep at night) . This came […]

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CloudStack 101

What Is Apache CloudStack™ Apache CloudStack™ is an open source software platform that pools computing resources to build Public, Private, and Hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. Apache CloudStack manages the Network, Storage, and Compute nodes that make up a Cloud infrastructure. The Story So Far. CloudStack started life as VMOps, a company founded in 2008 with product development spearheaded by Sheng Liang, who developed the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.  Whilst early versions were very much focused on the Xen Hypervisor, the team realised the benefits of multi-hypervisor support.  In early 2010, the company achieved a massive marketing […]

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Apache CloudStack 4.1 – New Feature Review

CloudStack 4.1 has just been released, bringing with it a raft of new features and improvements. 4.1 presents a milestone for Apache CloudStack as it is the first release since the projects graduation to a top level Apache project. Here’ I take a detailed look at some of the new features Add / Remove Network on VM Pre CloudStack 4.1, NICs could only be added to a VM during VM Creation. This new feature means they can now be added or removed from an existing VM, and in my opinion is one of the headline new features of the 4.1 release. […]

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Apache CloudStack 4.1 – New Features | CloudStack Feature First Look

CloudStack 4.1 is soon to be released, bringing with it a raft of new features and improvements; here I look at some of those new features that the latest release brings. Add / Remove Network on VM Pre CloudStack 4.1, NICs could only be added to a VM during VM Creation. This new feature means they can now be added or removed from an existing VM, and in my opinion is one of the headline new features of the 4.1 release. You cannot remove the NIC for the Default Network so you first add a new NIC, make it default, then […]

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Citrix Cloudstack 3.0 – a first review

Cloudstack version 3.0 is the first version of the established cloud orchestration technology to be built by Citrix themselves after their acquisition of Cloud.com last year. Giles Sirett, Managing Consultant of ShapeBlue the strategic CloudStack consultancy gives his first impressions of the new version. We’ve had the final beta of CloudStack 3.0 on the bench for some time now . To date, we like what we see. My very first, mile-high, view of this version of CloudStack  was that it has certainly been “Citrixfied”.  Direct support for their NetScaler load balancer as an external device will be welcome news for […]

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