Deploying CloudStack as a VMware Abstraction Layer
Reduce VMware licencing costs and run multi-hypervisors environment at scale
The hypervisor market is in a state of flux. For over a decade, VMware has entrenched itself as the gold-standard virtualisation platform for enterprises. However, their relentless march for revenue, expected to deepen by announcements earlier this year, has led many users to reconsider their long-term strategy. In the service provider space, the weight of this decision is amplified by the need to maintain margins for public cloud services.
Your VMware Environment Orchestrated by Apache CloudStack
Apache CloudStack has the ability to easily onboard existing VMware assets, including instances, networks and storage, with no downtime – just point CloudStack at your vCenter and you can start using it as an abstraction layer within minutes. In this way, Apache CloudStack can connect natively to the VMware API and register existing instances exporting their respective meta-data configurations, cataloguing the legacy, and handing over to users the management of these resources via the powerful CloudStack API or UI.
Adding a second hypervisor type to the environment can also be easily done in minutes.
Eliminate Dependencies, Huge Costs and Vendor Lock-in with Apache CloudStack
Apache CloudStack is an IaaS Orchestration Platform supporting a huge list of hypervisors. CloudStack can orchestrate virtually the entire range of hypervisors on the market, enabling cloud capabilities for enterprise infrastructure, and completely decoupling the infrastructure from user operations. This means that users don’t need to know anything about what’s running on the IT infrastructure, such as the network, servers, hypervisors, firewall, load balancer, VLANs and VPN as these resources are virtualized by CloudStack. Apache CloudStack enables enterprises to eliminate the bottle necks and dependencies.
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By definition, CloudStack is an abstraction layer. It presents its own API and then hides the specifics and complexities of talking to any specific hypervisor platform. Most importantly, as CloudStack is an open-source project, maintained by the Apache Software Foundation, vendor lock-in is not on the agenda.
Apache CloudStack PoC Guide
This POC guide gives you all the guidance you need to perform a successful Proof of Concept of Apache CloudStack.
By following this guide, you will be prepared for what to expect from the technology and how to move into production. The guide gives detailed configuration information. At the end of this PoC, you will have a highly available, reliable and flexible CloudStack-powered cloud.
Ensure a Future-Proof Technology Stack for Your Large-scale IaaS
CloudStack is designed to solve the problem of wanting to orchestrate large virtualised environments as an IaaS cloud, but it has a number of secondary benefits that help address these two types of dependencies.
CloudStack supports a broad range of hypervisors (VMware, KVM, Xen, XCP-ng, etc.) and makes it very easy to run mixed hypervisor environments. Importantly, users of the environment access any resources (irrespective of hypervisor type) through one API or one UI
Interested to learn more about Apache CloudStack and how to use it for your VMware environment? Get in touch with our CloudStack engineers and benefit from an initial free consultancy!
