2. WHAT IS A CLOUD ORCHESTRATOR?
▪ Coordinates existing database, storage and virtualization resources
▪ Provides the actual cloud experience everybody knows
▪ Allows the execution of logically simple tasks (create VM, migrate VM,
create snapshot and such) that require many actions across
components: create VHD file, add database entries, update website
look and feel…
▪ Corresponds to the Remote Management System and (sometimes)
Remote Administration System
3. HOW CAN WE CHOOSE ONE?
▪ Many choices are available, and the comparison can be a bit hazy
▪ Depending on the company’s needs and existing infrastructure,
licensing costs and complexity may become too high
▪ Sometimes, existing solutions may not adapt 100% to the company’s
need and wants
4. ENTER A FREE, OPEN SOLUTION
▪ What if we could use a product that provides:
▪ Complete access, free of cost
▪ High compatibility with the existing infrastructure
▪ Reliability, scalability and fault tolerance
▪ Open-source access to the source code, forking included
▪ If this sounds convenient, Apache Cloudstack may be the product you
should be using
5. SOME OF THE BENEFITS
▪ Really flexible license:
▪ Free of cost, allows modification and redistribution without extra fees (certain
conditions apply, per Apache Licensing)
▪ Compatiblity:
▪ It allows to use, simultaneously, multiple providers of virtualization, storage and
database systems
▪ Works in an ad-hoc manner, with an easy installation and almost no special
requirements
▪ Reliability and scalability:
▪ On simulated environments developed by Citrix, it has been tested with over 1000
hosts, hundreds of storage devices and ~10000 VMs
▪ Provides fault tolerance and HA environments
6. NOT EVERYTHING IS RAINBOW-COLORED
▪ Even though it’s a solid solution, it still has its flaws
▪ Some of the drawbacks include:
▪ Since it’s still in development, implementation can be a bit difficult
▪ Documentation may be a bit limited on certain scenarios
▪ It’s suited mostly for private clouds, since it doesn’t include billing management
▪ Some undocumented bugs!
7. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
▪ For the management/storage server:
▪ CentOS 6.3+ is recommended, but Ubuntu/Debian is also supported
▪ 4GB of RAM, x84 64-bit CPU (the more cores the better)
▪ At least 50GB of storage
▪ At least one NIC (if storage is provided, the more bandwidth the better)
▪ For the Hypervisor host:
▪ HVM support (this is flexible)
▪ 4GB of RAM (system VMs are created)
8. DEMO TIME!
▪ Two stages are being demoed:
▪ Installation stage:
▪ Virtualized networks done
▪ Existing XenServer hosts have been created and configured
▪ Storage server and MySQL databases created and configured
▪ We’ll be demoing the configuration wizard of Cloudstack
▪ Usage stage
▪ With Cloudstack configured, we’ll create a VM
