Cloudstack configuration, deployment and management, and use of APIs

This is the purpose of this article, that is, to faithfully record and try to sum up some of the problems in this process, and share with you.

With Amazon's success in the private cloud of public cloud and VMware, companies are taking their own steps in the cloud era, which they want to maintain at a relatively low cost while gaining powerful functionality in their computing resources (host, network, storage) virtualization. This is the driver of IaaS suppliers.

IaaS provides automated management of resources. For example, the use of interfaces, scripts, and even Web Service APIs to achieve a large number of hardware, a large number of virtual machines lifecycle management. IaaS products face a large, scalable cloud environment that is completely different from the way you manage limited resources by hand.

Cloudstack, formerly a commercial product of cloud.com, was Ctrix in 2011 to buy more than 200 million dollars, which was then donated to the Apache Foundation this year. The open Source initiative has sparked some controversy over the IaaS development route, such as its competition and partnership with another Open-source product, OpenStack.

OpenStack, an IaaS developed by Rackspace and NASA, has a larger user base, including big companies such as Hp,ibm,dell and Redhat. Table 1 lists some of the comparisons between Cloudstack and OpenStack.

Table 1.CloudStack Comparison with OpenStack

Cloudstack OpenStack License Apache 2.0 Licensing protocol, free for business model Apache 2.0 licensing agreement, free for business model support Hypervisors kvm,xen,oracle Vm,vsphere and Bare Metal Kvm,xen, (partially supported HYPER-V,ESX,POWERVM) Networking Model Openflow,vlan and Flat NX DHCP Supported Storage nfs,cluster Lvm,rados block Device (Ceph), less than 60 client groups for local Storage iscsi,ceph,nfs,local and Swift (object storage) including Nokia, Zynga, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company, Tata, Alcatel 160, including NASA,RACKSPACE,HP, Red Hat, piston development language Java primarily Python compatible Amazon EC2 API is

It can be argued that the two IaaS platforms in the market, Cloudstack and OpenStack, have different functions, customers and development routes, the former as commercial software, which has proven to be reliable for production systems, while the latter, although currently lacks a wide range of real users, Has more big companies to support. This is a significant difference.

However, the source code contributors behind them are not necessarily different from the technology, and often have developers from the same company submitting codes for both open source projects. In this sense, the merging of two platforms on one day will not be surprising.

There are many other IaaS products (such as eucalyptus,nebula, etc.) that can be found in the reference resources at the end of the article. In general, Cloudstack and OpenStack are among the most closely related and contentious of these products, and an article in reference resources mentions a recent interesting debate.

Cloudstack Frame composition

Cloudstack employs a typical hierarchical structure: the client, the core engine, and the resource layer. It provides different ways to access various types of customers: Web Console, Command Shell, and Web Service APIs. Through them, users can manage the computing resources (which are divided into hosts, networks, and storage) at the bottom of the system, such as assigning virtual machines on the host, allocating virtual disks, and so on. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. System Architecture Diagram

Virtual machines If you use Xen and KVM, you need to install the Cloudstack Agent to support its interaction with the Management Server. The Management server interacts with the Xen server by XAPI, and vcenter and ESX interact with HTTP.