Thursday, May 27 was the first-ever vCSEUG, and the first time the community had met since February 2020 (the last pre-COVID meetup in Berlin). It was time to reconnect! We have missed the chance to interact with other community members, learn what’s new in CloudStack and hear from the companies using it. So, we needed to find a solution to overcome all barriers. Organizing a virtual event was not only a great chance for the EU User Group members to meet but also to invite CloudStack community members and contributors from all around the globe to join in.
About the Attendees and Speakers
The vCSEUG proved to be a huge success. People joined from 23 countries and 4 continents (by my count) – from Germany, UK, Switzerland, India, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Serbia, Brazil, Chile, Russia, USA, Canada, Japan, France, Uruguay, Korea … (apologies if I have missed anyone)! We also had a record number of registrations and attendees for a CloudStack User Group Event. Physical distance was not an issue for our speakers, who joined the event from 6 different countries.
As usual, this was a half-day event, but we chose to have shorter talks so that we could accommodate a wider range of topics, proving that when you want to learn new things and meet the CloudStack community, nothing can stop you. During the day, we enjoyed 6 sessions from industry leaders, with conversation continuing in the ‘vPub’ after the last talk.
Without the need for sponsorship for a venue and refreshments, instead, we surprised some of the attendees with great prizes provided by the event sponsors – ShapeBlue, LINBIT, Dimsi, StorPool and PC Extreme – all of whom helped us to make the virtual event happen.
vCSEUG Proved to be a Huge Success
You may ask: “What is the secret behind making a virtual event happen?”. We think it is the great community we have and its dedication to doing something valuable and exciting after a long time of being not able to meet. This was evident by the number of attendees and the quality of talks, questions and ongoing collaboration.
If you missed the event or some of the talks, we are happy to share recordings as usual and will make all slides available on SlideShare. Continue reading and discover more about the event sessions and our awesome speakers.
vCSEUG Talks and Presentations
What’s New in CloudStack 4.15 – Giles Sirett
vCSEUG started with a talk from Giles Sirett, Chairman of the CSEUG and PMC member, Apache CloudStack. Giles welcomed the attendees and shared in-depth insights about the new features and functionalities in CloudStack 4.15. He also provided info on when 4.15.1 and 4.16 are expected, presented the new VP of Apache CloudStack (Gabriel Brascher), talked through the latest integrations to CloudStack, improvements in the UI, new OS support, advanced capabilities of vSphere, OVF support, dynamic roles enhancements and more. Giles talk in full here:
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Customising the CloudStack UI – Abhishek Kumar
The next talk came from Abhishek Kumar, Software Developer at ShapeBlue, who focused on customizing the new UI. It aimed to teach administrators how to tailor the UI aesthetics to their organization’s preferences. The session targeted advanced users, training them to alter the layout of the UI, add, remove, or restrict resource actions from the UI. You can read more on how to customize the CloudStack UI on our blog and watch a full recording of Abhishesk’s session:
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From Мetal to Service: 100% automation with Apache CloudStack and Ansible – Rafael del Valle
The next talk was presented by Rafael del Valle, Co-Founder of Celpax. His session was “From metal to service: 100% automation with Apache CloudStack and Ansible”. Celpax.com has recently deployed Apache CloudStack on Hetzner+Premises with full metal to service automation. In this talk, Rafael presented their success story. Furthermore, he shared why they chose open-source technologies and what advantages they got.
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KVM High Availability Regardless of Storage – Gabriel Brascher
One of the most highly-anticipated talks was by the new Apache Cloudstack VP – Gabriel Beims Bräscher – talking about KVM High Availability Regardless of Storage. One of the great advantages of CloudStack is that it is vendor-independent, meaning you can decide the technology stack above and below based on your experience or needs. Having High Availability enabled for KVM hosts can improve greatly the QoS by handling (fence/recover) a problematic Host as well as re-starting its stopped VMs on healthy hosts. However, there is a limitation on CloudStack HA for KVM – it relies mainly on NFS heartbeat script checks. Gabriel’s talk illustrated how CloudStack HA works for KVM hosts and presented a way of improving its implementation in a way that KVM HA works with any storage system pluggable on KVM, not just NFS.
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CloudStack and Tungsten Fabric SDN Integration – Simon Weller, Radu Todirica
After a short break, we continued with CloudStack and Tungsten Fabric SDN Integration Update, presented by Radu Todirica and Simon Weller from Education Networks of America (ENA). Over the past year, ENA and EWERK have been collaborating on a new ACS plugin for the Tungsten Fabric SDN controller. Simon Weller and Radu Todirica provided an update on progress, feature overview and a live demo.
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CloudStack Deployments for Edge Use Cases – Rudraksh Kulshreshtha
The honour of the last talk of the day was given to Rudraksh Kulshreshtha from IndiQus, who presented how to architect lean CloudStack deployments for Edge use cases.
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After the last talk, and the usual round of questions and answers, we headed over to the vPub where conversation, collaboration and debate continued. We would like to thank all attendees, sponsors and people engaged in the event who made it happen.
See you soon on another virtual or maybe live event …
Ivet Petrova is the Marketing Director of ShapeBlue. She is responsible for strengthening ShapeBlue’s global brand and market awareness of ShapeBlue’s services. Specifically, Ivet’s team is responsible for brand, advertising, content and digital marketing, social media, and media relations.
