vSphere Datastore Cluster State Synchronisation
Apache CloudStack 4.15 introduced several new capabilities for vSphere, including support for datastore clusters. Following production use of the new features and feedback from users, an opportunity for improvement was noticed. If a storage pool is added or removed from the datastore cluster in vCenter, to see those changes in CloudStack it is necessary to […]
Storage Plugin for Dell EMC PowerFlex | CloudStack Feature First Look
For primary storage, CloudStack supports many managed storage solutions via storage plugins, such as SolidFire, Ceph, Datera, CloudByte and Nexenta. There are other managed storages which CloudStack does not support, one of which is Dell EMC PowerFlex (formerly known as VxFlexOS or ScaleIO). PowerFlex is a distributed shared block storage, like Ceph / RBD storage. […]
vSphere Advanced Capabilities in CloudStack | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Introduction CloudStack vSphere integration has not kept up with the evolution of vSphere itself, and several functions can be performed natively by vSphere much more efficiently than by CloudStack. vSphere also has additional features which would be beneficial to the operators of vSphere based CloudStack clouds. This feature introduces support in CloudStack for VMFS6, vSAN, […]
Secondary Storage Management | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
In CloudStack, secondary storage pools (image stores) house resources such as volumes, snapshots and templates. Over time these storage pools may have to be decommissioned or data moved from one storage pool to another, but CloudStack isn’t too evolved when it comes to managing secondary storage pools. This feature improves CloudStack’s management of secondary storage […]
Direct Download agnostic of the storage provider | CloudStack Feature First Look
Introduction In a previous post, ShapeBlue’s Boris Stoyanov introduced a feature for KVM which allows administrators to register templates and ISOs without needing secondary storage as an intermediate cache. This feature is known as Direct Download in CloudStack. Without an intermediate cache, the templates and ISOs direct download registration process differs from the usual process, […]
Improvements for Template Direct Download | CloudStack Feature First Look
For some time now, CloudStack has supported the direct download of user templates for the KVM hypervisor. This basically allows user to register a template (whilst bypassing secondary storage) and directly download and install it to primary storage where it can be used for deployment: With CloudStack 4.14, this has been improved by adding direct […]
SolidFire with CloudStack
Aside from traditional storage solutions, CloudStack has supported managed storage for some time. In this article, we will touch on SolidFire support in CloudStack 4.13 and lay out the exact steps needed to add SolidFire to CloudStack as Primary Storage (for VMware, KVM and XenServer). We will also explain the difference between the “SolidFire” and […]
Machine Learning and Apache CloudStack
Introduction In this blog we discuss applications of machine learning (ML) in datacenters and how that might integrate with Apache CloudStack (ACS). We also try to identify various places in the lifecycle of datacentres where such tools can be helpful. With any datacentre deployment, the primary goal is to achieve efficient resource provisioning whilst also […]
Ceph and CloudStack – Part 3
Introduction In the previous two parts of this article series, we have covered the complete Ceph installation process and implemented Ceph as an additional Primary Storage in CloudStack. In this final part, I will show you some examples of working with RBD images, and will cover some Ceph specifics, both in general and related to […]
Ceph and CloudStack – Part 2
In the previous article we covered some basics around Ceph and deployed a working Ceph cluster. In this article, we are going to finish the Ceph configuration needed for CloudStack and add it as a new Primary Storage pool. We are also going to deploy Ceph volumes via CloudStack and examine them. Finally, in part […]
