State of the Hypervisor Market
In the ever-evolving realm of virtualization, hypervisors are a fundamental technology enabling the management of virtual machines. The choice of the underlying hypervisor for CloudStack-based clouds is one of the most important architectural decisions to make, impacting everything from resource utilisation to IT budgeting and the ability to adapt to future technological shifts. Unlike other […]
VMware Abstraction Using Apache CloudStack
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 […]
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 […]
VMware Migration Improvements | CloudStack Feature First Look
Migration of virtual machines between physical hosts or clusters is essential for cloud operators, allowing them to perform maintenance with little or no downtime, or balance compute and storage resources when necessary. CloudStack supports both live and cold migration (if supported by the hypervisor), and most hypervisors allow VM and volume migration in some form […]
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 […]