Direct Download agnostic of the storage provider | CloudStack Feature First Look
Introduction In a previous post, ShapeBlue’s Boris Stoyanov introduced a feature for KVM which allows administrators to register templates and ISOs without needing secondary storage as an intermediate cache. This feature is known as Direct Download in CloudStack. Without an intermediate cache, the templates and ISOs direct download registration process differs from the usual process, […]
Enable sending of arbitrary configuration data to VMs | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature allows the sending of arbitrary additional VM configurations to user VMs on CloudStack and is supported by KVM, XenServer and VMware hypervisors. The administrator enables or disables this feature by the global configuration ‘enable.additional.vm.configuration’ which is disabled by default. To add a second layer of security, the administrator must explicitly set a comma-separated […]
Hosts stuck in PrepareForMaintenance state | CloudStack Feature First Look
The process of setting a host into maintenance in CloudStack requires an administrator to ask for ‘prepare for maintenance’, either via API or through the UI on a host. When CloudStack receives the request to prepare the host for maintenance, the host state is set to ‘PrepareForMaintenance’ and any VM running on the host start […]
VR Health Checks | CloudStack Feature First Look
This feature introduces an easy and integrated way to check the health of virtual routers (VRs) within CloudStack. With the help of these checks, administrators can monitor VRs and take any necessary action when a failure is reported. These health checks can be basic or advanced. Basic health checks include: Connectivity from the management server to […]
Improvements for Template Direct Download | CloudStack Feature First Look
For some time now, CloudStack has supported the direct download of user templates for the KVM hypervisor. This basically allows user to register a template (whilst bypassing secondary storage) and directly download and install it to primary storage where it can be used for deployment: With CloudStack 4.14, this has been improved by adding direct […]
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 […]
Layer 2 Networks in CloudStack
Layer 2 (also known as the Data Link Layer) is the second in the seven-layer OSI reference model for network protocol design, and is equivalent to the link layer (the lowest layer) in the TCP/IP network model. Layer 2 is the network layer used to transfer data between adjacent network nodes in a wide area […]
CloudStack Primary Storage
Paul Angus, Cloud Architect at ShapeBlue takes an interesting look at how to separate Cloudstack’s management traffic from its primary storage traffic. I recently looked at physical networking in a CloudStack environment and alluded to the fact that you cannot separate primary storage traffic from management traffic from CloudStack, but that it is still possible. […]
CloudStack 4.3 – a first review
The latest release of Apache CloudStack has arrived with a raft of exciting new features. In this early review, Giles Sirett, CEO of ShapeBlue looks at the significance of some of these features and why they help to continue to position CloudStack as the IaaS orchestration platform of choice for many service providers and enterprises […]
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 […]
