Dell Technologies, in collaboration with ShapeBlue, developed a white paper describing the integration of Dell PowerFlex storage with the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. This integration facilitates the deployment of reliable and easy-to-manage cloud infrastructure with KVM hypervisor using the PowerFlex storage.

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Storage is a key part of cloud platforms, supporting the services built on them. As data increases rapidly, the demand for storage that is reliable, scalable, and affordable also rises quickly. It’s important to increase storage capacity as the business grows.

Apache CloudStack is an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that manages and orchestrates pools of storage, network, and computer resources to build a public or private IaaS compute cloud. Within the CloudStack environment, storage assumes a pivotal role to ensure the seamless functioning of instances and the accessibility of vital resources. This infrastructure hosts instances of both root disks and additional data disks. For optimal CloudStack deployment and operations, a reliable and high-performance enterprise storage platform is indispensable. It must offer attributes such as reliability, low latency, and high IOPS to guarantee the optimal performance and operations of instances within CloudStack.

PowerFlex, with its software-defined approach, stands as an good platform to meet these requirements, especially in the context of large-scale IaaS deployments.
PowerFlex also delivers stable and predictable performance for all workloads. Furthermore, PowerFlex Manager, a unified management toolset for PowerFlex systems, simplifies IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) tasks by providing extensive automation and a rich out-of-the-box toolset that includes PowerFlex REST API, PowerFlex Ansible modules, and Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and CSI drivers to enhance DevOps productivity and IT agility. CloudStack can use these REST APIs to enhance functionality, facilitate streamlined provisioning, effective data management, robust snapshot management, comprehensive data protection, and seamless scalability making the combination of PowerFlex storage and CloudStack a robust choice for modern IaaS environments. This integration allows you to enable instant snapshots, volume provisioning, VM
provisioning, and other settings that can be changed in-flight to address changes in user requirements.

This white paper provides guidance for the deployment of CloudStack and configuring Dell PowerFlex as the underlying software-defined infrastructure. This paper also gives an overview of a few CloudStack operations such as VM operations, templates, volumes, and snapshots using the PowerFlex storage.

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