Send hypervisor host name via metadata | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows admins to expose the hypervisor host name to a User VM instance either through Config Drive or Virtual Router, based on the user data provider chosen for the network offering on which the VM instance is deployed. To expose this information, the new Global configuration “global.allow.expose.host.hostname“ and the new Account scope configuration […]
Enable unmanaging of guest instances | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows CloudStack administrators to unmanage guest virtual machines (VMs) from their CloudStack infrastructure. Once unmanaged, CloudStack can no longer monitor, control, or manage provisioning and orchestration related operations on it. This feature is currently supported only on VMware. An interesting use case of this feature (when used in conjunction with the VM ingestion […]
KVM Rolling Maintenance | CloudStack Feature First Look
In a typical scenario prior to this feature, the administrator had to automate the process of setting hosts in maintenance before upgrading, usually using external automation tools. This feature allows administrators to perform the entire process within CloudStack, providing a flexible framework that allows defining custom scripts to execute on each host. CloudStack executes these scripts […]
Enable sending of arbitrary configuration data to VMs | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows the sending of arbitrary additional VM configurations to user VMs on CloudStack and is supported by KVM, XenServer and VMware hypervisors. The administrator enables or disables this feature by the global configuration ‘enable.additional.vm.configuration’ which is disabled by default. To add a second layer of security, the administrator must explicitly set a comma-separated […]
Hosts stuck in PrepareForMaintenance state | CloudStack Feature First Look
The process of setting a host into maintenance in CloudStack requires an administrator to ask for ‘prepare for maintenance’, either via API or through the UI on a host. When CloudStack receives the request to prepare the host for maintenance, the host state is set to ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ and any VM running on the host start […]
VM Ingestion | CloudStack Feature First Look
Apache CloudStack has proved itself to be a great cloud orchestrator and is probably one of the best open-source platforms available for deployment of new IaaS environments. However, until now there has been little or no support for importing an existing cloud environment with all its resources and entities into CloudStack. This is going to […]
Openvswitch with DPDK support on CloudStack – Part 2 | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Introduction In my previous post, I described the new ‘Open vSwitch with DPDK support’ on CloudStack for KVM hosts. There, I focused on describing the feature, as it was new to CloudStack, and also explained the necessary configuration on the KVM agents’ side to enable DPDK support. DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) (https://www.dpdk.org/) is a […]
Openvswitch with DPDK support on CloudStack | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Introduction This blog describes a new feature to be introduced in the CloudStack 4.12 release (already in the current master branch of the CloudStack repository). This feature will provide support for the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) in conjunction with Open vSwitch (OVS) for guest VMs and is targeted at the KVM hypervisor. The Data […]
Networking KVM for CloudStack – a 2018 revisit for CentOS7 & Ubuntu 18.04 | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Introduction We published the original blog post on KVM networking in 2016 – but in the meantime we have moved on a generation in CentOS and Ubuntu operating systems, and some of the original information is therefore out of date. In this revisit of the original blog post we cover new configuration options for CentOS 7.x […]
Secure Live KVM VM Migration with CloudStack 4.11.1 | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Introduction CloudStack 4.11.1 introduces a new security enhancement on top of the new CA framework to secure live KVM VM migrations. This feature allows live migration of guest VMs across KVM hosts using secured TLS enabled libvirtd process. Without this feature, the live migration of guest VMs across KVM hosts would use an unsecured TCP connection, which is prone […]
