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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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