Recovery of VMs to new CloudStack instance
We recently came across a very unusual issue where a client had a major security breach on their network. As well as lots of other damage their CloudStack infrastructure was maliciously damaged beyond recovery. Luckily the hackers hadn’t manage to damage the backend XenServer hypervisors so they were quite happily still running user VMs and Virtual Routers, […]
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 […]
