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, […]
Support Virtual Appliance OVA Templates in VMware | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive
Vendors of virtual appliances (vApp) for VMware often produce ‘templates’ of their appliances in an OVA format. An OVA file will contain disc images, configuration data of the virtual appliance, and sometimes a EULA which must be acknowledged. The purpose of this feature is to enable CloudStack to mimic the end-user experience of importing such […]
Boot into Hardware Setup | CloudStack Feature First Look
Users and administrators sometimes need to change the boot order of a virtual machine (VM) so that they can (for example) force a VM to boot from an ISO. However, sometimes the proxied console session does not appear until after the opportunity to enter the BIOS menu has passed. This feature allows an admin to […]
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 […]
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 […]
CloudStack global settings with VMware
In this article, Paul Angus Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue looks into a few interesting settings when using CloudStack to orchestrate VMware environments Working with CloudStack 4.3 and VMware 5.5 in our lab recently, I came to using some very interesting global settings which renewed a project I had on the back burner… vm.instancename.flag This global […]
Citrix CloudPlatform 4.2 – a first review
With much fanfare, Citrix yesterday formally announced the 4.2 release of their IaaS cloud orchestration technology CloudPlatform. In parallel, the Apache Software Foundation are about to announce version 4.2 of Cloudstack. In this article, Giles Sirett CEO of ShapeBlue gives his first impressions on CloudPlatform 4.2 At ShapeBlue, we’ve had both of these technologies on […]
Citrix CloudPlatform 3.0.4 – What’s New
Citrix CloudPlatform is powered by Apache CloudStack, but it seems that companies who have opted to use the Citrix licensed, and therefore supported version, are getting far more bang for their buck. Citrix released v3.0.3 of CloudPlatform back at the beginning of June, and have now issued yet another update, v3.0.4, released on the 18th […]
How to beat the VMWare Vtax.
Citrix CloudStack eases the financial impact associated with the “vTax,” the term used by many in the cloud and virtualization communities to refer to the latest update to the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model that added costs to customers’ existing cloud and virtualization implementations. Since CloudStack can support multiple hypervisors in the same cloud, VMware […]
