CloudStack European User Group

Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/02/2015 - 27/03/2015
12:00 am

Location
Trend Micro

Winter meeting of CloudStack European User group.

As always, there will be some great speakers, the chance to meet with other CloudStack users, with pizza for lunch and time to continue the discussions over a beer or two in the evening.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the last two user groups have sold out and we’ve had a waiting list for places. Please ensure you are able to attend before booking tickets.

VENUE: Trend Micro, 2 Kingdom Street, London, W2 6BD. Nearest tube: Paddington

Directions to venue: It’s super easy to get to our building from Paddington Station (if you know where you’re going). Just walk down platform 8 until you get to the end and follow signs to the Hammersmith & City line. Just before the Hammersmith & City tube barriers, there is an exit for Grand Union Canal. Walk up the stairs and you’ll see signs for Kingdom Street. Turn left and just follow the signs for Kingdom Street. We are at 2, Kingdom Street past all the shops and eating places but before the Novotel hotel.

AGENDA AND SPEAKERS:

XenServer HA with CloudStack, Geoff Higginbottom
Up until now when using XenServer with CloudStack, the XenServer HA Feature was not enabled as CloudStack took care of all HA events. However, the release of XS62ESP1004 changed a few things.

Geoff will talk about the significance of this change in XenServer, and why it is essential for people running Cloudstack and XenServer to understand both the benefits and potential pitfalls. He will give detailed advice on avoiding those pitfalls.

Monitoring Cloudstack, Richard Chart
Richard will take a brief run through of the ScienceLogic monitoring platform functionality and discuss the recent integration of ScienceLogic for Cloudstack. This will cover the challenges experienced in instrumenting against the Cloudstack platform, and some of the nuanced learning about the platform vis-a-vis the other technology stacks that we’ve instrumented against. More significantly Richard will be soliciting input into specific use-cases and the components that legacy and existing cloudstack monitoring tools have been missing, so better understand the practical expectations from a mature Cloudstack monitoring tool.

Redundant Virtual Private Clouds, Wilder Rodrigues, Schuberg Philis
Virtual Private Clouds provide a better way to manager network tiers, or subnets, within Apache CloudStack. They also offer Access Control Lists per subnet, Private Gateways and Site2Site VPNs. However, the CloudStack VPCs are not redundant: they depend on only one virtual router. In case of a crash of the existing virtual router, all network tiers will be gone and the Virtual Machines residing in that VPC will be unreachable.

The Redundant Virtual Private Cloud implementation offers the possibility of having two virtual routers, improving disaster recovery and increasing applications’ uptime.

CloudStack 4.5 – what’s new, Paul Angus
CloudStack 4.5 promises to be a major release of CloudStack, both in terms of features and overall stability, and is due for release late January 2015. Paul will take a detailed first-look at the new functionality.

So you think you can contribute? Daan Hoogland, Schuberg Philis
Schuberg Philis has been working in-house at making CloudStack VPCs have redundancy as option. This work is hardly contributed back yet because of the social and technical inhibitions that the project puts on people.

Daan will talk about the project, several ways that this project should improve and is improving, and the several ways to contribute.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Geoff Higginbottom – ShapeBlue. Geoff is CTO of ShapeBlue and a leading global authority on the design of Cloud infrastructures based on CloudStack and CloudPlatform. He is a committer in the Apache Cloudstack project and has designed many global clouds for both public and private cloud use-cases. He combines his deep cloudstack knowledge with extensive experience in a range of network, storage and compute technologies. When not building clouds, Geoff likes to talk about building clouds.

Richard Chart – ScienceLogic. Richard is EVP (Product Management) of ScienceLogic, a fast growing software technology firm, with a monitoring and management platform that is agnostic to the IT infrastructure technologies being monitored, whether cloud services or an on-prem IT stack. The company is deeply involved in supporting Service Providers and Enterprises alike, making the transition to Cloud Services.

One of the company founders, Richard Chart’s energy and engineering drive has helped ScienceLogic bring dial-tone availability levels to IT operations.

Richard has 20 years of systems engineering, software development, and technology operations experience.

Wilder Rodrigues, Schuberg Philis. With 20+ years of experience with Software Development, from embedded to enterprise level, Wilder is now contributing to the Apache community by leading the implementation of Redundant VPCs within CloudStack. The development of RVPC is being carried out at Schuberg Philis, Wilder’s current employer.

Paul Angus, ShapeBlue. Paul is a Senior Consultant & Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue, the leading independent CloudStack integrator & consultancy. He has designed numerous CloudStack environments for customers across 4 continents. Paul has spoken at all of the Cloudstack collaboration conferences and is a committer and active contributor to the Apache CloudStack project.

When not building Clouds, Paul likes to create scripts that build clouds, and can very occasionally can be seen trying to hit a golf ball.

Daan Hoogland – Schuberg Philis. Daan is a Mission Critical Developer at Schuberg Philis and Apache Cloudstack PMC member- contributor of code.