System VM Upgrades

Recently we’ve seen a few clients being tripped up by the System VM upgrades during the CloudStack upgrades in multi-zone deployments. The issue occurs when the System VM is pre-deployed individually to multiple zones, rather than being a single template deployed to multiple zones. This may be done in error or because the specific version […]

How to Deploy High Availability CloudStack with MariaDB Galera Cluster

As a cloud infrastructure scales to hundreds or thousands of servers, high availability becomes a key requirement of the production environments supporting multiple applications and services. Since the management servers use a MySQL database to store the state of all its objects, the database could become a single point of failure. The CloudStack manual recommends […]

How to Build a CloudStack Test Environment using VirtualBox

Introduction If you are new to Apache CloudStack and want to learn the concepts but do not have all the equipment required to stand-up a test environment, why not use your existing PC and VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a cross platform virtualisation application which runs on OSX, Windows, Linux and Solaris, meaning no matter what OS […]

How to upgrade an Apache CloudStack Citrix XenServer Cluster

So you have a Cluster of Citrix XenServers and you want to upgrade them to a new version, for example to go from XenServer 6.0.2 to XenServer 6.2, or simply apply the latest Hotfixes.  As this is a cluster that is being managed by CloudStack it is not as simple as using the Rolling Pool Upgrade […]

How to Mitigate OpenSSL HeartBleed Vulnerability in Apache CloudStack

UPDATE: 09-Apr-2014 – The proper upgrade command is “apt-get install openssl libssl1.0.0”. If you’ve just updated openssl, please go back and update libssl as well. UPDATE: 10-Apr-2014 – Added detailed verification steps / Apache CloudStack 4.0 – 4.1 are not vulnerable, they use older Debian/openssl. Thanks to all involved for helping to put together and update […]

Sending log messages to a Syslog Server

  CloudStack Logs are known for not being the easiest things to read, and when trouble shooting a difficult problem anything which makes life a little easier is very welcome. By offloading the Management Log to a Syslog Server, Filters and Tagging can be used to greatly simplify the process of reading the log files.  […]

Using the CloudStack API for Advanced Network Management

  The CloudStack API is a very powerful tool which once mastered provides Administrators access to all of CloudStack’s features, many of which are not available via the GUI. During a number of recent Projects the ShapeBlue consulting team needed to leverage these features in order to deliver the advanced solutions our clients required. This […]

Apache CloudStack enables existing VMware users and gives an easy way for service providers to migrate to a fully open-source solution and eliminate vendor dependency.