Cloudstack: Configuring and managing a simple cloud

Cloudstack is the Ctrix company's flagship product in the IaaS market, providing flexible deployment and management capabilities for cloud computing resources. In the first half of this year Ctrix will contribute its source code to Apache, Cloudstack become an open source project. The documentation for such open source projects has been perfected, but as a novice in the cloud computing field tries to install and deploy it, there are still more or less challenges. 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.

Cloudstack background and major competitor in IaaS market

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

Cloudstackopenstacklicenseapache 2.0 Licensing agreement, free for business model Apache 2.0 licensing agreement, free for business model support Hypervisorskvm,xen,oracle VM, Networking Modelopenflow,vlan and Flat Networksvlan,flat,flat, supported by vsphere and Bare Metalkvm,xen, (limited support HYPER-V,ESX,POWERVM) Storagenfs,cluster Lvm,rados block Device (Ceph) with DHCP support, local storageiscsi,ceph,nfs,local Storage and Swift (object storage) customer base less than 60 Home, 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

Appendix: Compare data to 2012, the corresponding software version is Cloudstack 3 and OpenStack Essex.

It can be argued that the two IaaS platforms on the market cloudstack and OpenStack have different functions, customers and development routes, the former as commercial software, has been proven to be reliable for production systems, while the latter, although the current lack of a wide range of real users, but has more Large company 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.

When deploying Cloudstack, you need to understand its hierarchy and storage management, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Deployment diagram

Zone:zone corresponds to a data center in the real world, which is the largest unit in the Cloudstack.

Pod:pod corresponds to a rack. Machines in the same pod are in the same subnet (network segment).

Cluster:cluster is a cluster of multiple hosts. Hosts in the same cluster have the same hardware, the same Hypervisor, and share the same storage. A virtual machine in the same cluster can migrate from one host to another without interruption.

Host:host is the host that runs the virtual machine (VM).

That is, from the inclusion relationship, a zone contains multiple pods, one pod contains multiple cluster, and one cluster contains multiple host.

There are two types of storage in Cloudstack:

Primary Storage: First-level storage is associated with the cluster, which provides disk volumes for all virtual machines for the hosts in the cluster. A cluster has at least one level of storage and is positioned near the host to provide high performance at deployment time.

Secondary storage: Level Two storage is associated with the zone, which stores template files, ISO images, and disk volume snapshots.

Template: You can start the operating system mirroring of the virtual machine and include the rest of the configuration information, such as the installed application.

ISO Image: A disk image that contains operating system data or boot media.

Disk volume Snapshot: A stored copy of the virtual machine data that can be used for data recovery or to create a new template.

Next, look at the 2nd page highlights: http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-10/90846p2.htm

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Related reading:

Cloudstack compilation environment XenServer boot system virtual machine failed http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-08/88694.htm

Cloudstack 4.0.2 vrouter causes abnormal state after reboot http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-08/88474.htm

Cloudstack Deployment Manual PDF Clear Version http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-06/86114.htm

Cloudstack 4.0 + KVM installation Detail Guide http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-06/85750.htm

Install deployment Cloudstack 4.0 Enterprise Private cloud Platform http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-06/85748.htm

Cloudstack installation Deployment and FAQ http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2013-06/85746.htm