Overview
As of the 4.15 release, CloudStack has supported various EL8 operating systems / hypervisors, namely RHEL 8, CentOS 8, Rocky Linux 8 (and in theory – as of CloudStack 4.16 – all other EL8 variants including e.g. Alma Linux 8) – for both management servers and hypervisors. Similarly, support for Ubuntu 20.04 was added as of CloudStack 4.15, and OpenSUSE as of 4.16. All these Linux systems worked fine as hypervisors, until libvirt was upgraded to version 8+.
Effects on CloudStack
Historically, CloudStack used to set 22-character VNC passwords for KVM Virtual Machines, and libvirt was silently trimming it to 8 characters – and everyone was happy. But, with the latest libvirt changes (introduced in libvirt version 8, as explained here ) – libvirt will now throw an error and refuse to start or migrate a VM if its XML contains a VNC password longer than 8 characters. This would effectively be a deal-breaker for cloud operators and the only solution was to downgrade libvirt to an older (<8) version.
This affects CloudStack versions 4.15.0.0, 4.15.1.0, 4.15.2.0, 4.16.0.0, 4.16.1.0.
Potentially affected Linux systems (some confirmed, some expected to be affected in near future or with Libvirt packages from external / enterprise repositories):
– All EL8 variants (RHEL 8, Rocky Linux 8, Alma Linux 8, CentOS 8)
– Ubuntu 20.04
– OpenSUSE 15.3 (and other SUSE variants expected)
Resolution
ShapeBlue has released patches for both 4.15 and 4.16 LTS branches that fix these issues. These fixes are already available in the upstream Apache CloudStack project and have made into the 4.17.0.0 release. The list of fixes that were made in these patches can be found here:
https://github.com/shapeblue/cloudstack/releases/tag/4.16.1.0-shapeblue1
https://github.com/shapeblue/cloudstack/releases/tag/4.15.2.0-shapeblue1
These 4.15 and 4.16 patches are available in ShapeBlue repositories, please refer to https://www.shapeblue.com/packages for usage. To apply these patches, use the ShapeBlue CloudStack repositories to upgrade packages on the management server and KVM hosts.
Further information
For ShapeBlue support customers, please contact the support team for further information. For other CloudStack users, please use the community mailing lists
Andrija Panic is a Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue and a PMC member of Apache CloudStack. With almost 20 years in the IT industry and over 12 years of intimate work with CloudStack, Andrija has helped some of the largest, worldwide organizations build their clouds, migrate from commercial forks of CloudStack, and has provided consulting and support to a range of public, private, and government cloud providers across the US, EMEA, and Japan. Away from work, he enjoys spending time with his daughters, riding his bike, and tries to avoid adrenaline-filled activities.
You can learn more about Andrija and his background by reading his Meet The Team blog.
