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 4.15.
CentOS 8 uses a more recent QEMU version, Python 3 by default and deprecates several networking tools (such as bridge-utils), therefore a number of changes have been made:
- Python scripts related to setting up of management and usage servers and KVM agent have been migrated from Python 2 to Python 3.
- Python 2 dependencies from cloudstack packages (cloudstack-common, cloudstack-management, cloudstack-usage and cloudstack-agent) have been removed.
- Support for MySQL 8 (as CentOS 8 installs this by default).
With this feature, changes have also been made to the snapshot related codebase on KVM to support the newer version of the qemu-img utility. This should prevent issues with snapshot management on an OS with newer QEMU version.
KVM hosts and management / usage servers on CentOS 7 will continue to work as before and only new python 3 dependencies (python3, python3-pip and python3-setuptools) will be installed during upgrade.
Abhishek Kumar is a software engineer by profession. His personal interests and hobbies are technology, politics and sports. Abhishek is experienced in development and management of a variety of desktop and mobile applications. He has a particular interest in mobile application development, designing and developing highly interactive and intuitive mobile, desktop applications GUI.
Abhishek became part of ShapeBlue in 2019 and is currently an active Apache CloudStack Committer.
You can learn more about Abhishek and his background by reading his Meet The Team blog.
