1. About ShapeBlue
“ShapeBlue are expert builders of public & private clouds. They are the leading independent global CloudStack services company”

2. Paul Angus ShapeBlue VP Technology & Chair/VP Apache CloudStack
About me
Paul Angus ShapeBlue VP Technology &
Chair/VP Apache CloudStack
Global authority on CloudStack & cloud infrastructure design.
20+ years C-Level experience.
Apache CloudStack project committer & PMC member
Specialising in deployment of CloudStack and surrounding infrastructure especially the user story
USP, Georgian Ministry of Justice, Orange, TomTom, PaddyPower, Ascenty, BSkyB, SAP, British Telecom

3. ShapeBlue customers

4. ShapeBlue customers

5. ShapeBlue customers

6. Introduction

7. Ability to have bounded custom offerings
Ability to have networks which aren’t charged for
OVA Appliance support (extra data)
Ability to Create a Storage compute, network, VPC Offering for specified domain(s) and zone(s)
Ability to set tags when creating a resource like a snap or a snap policy
DPDK Live migration & Offerings
Multidisk OVA upload from local support
ISO upload from local support

8. Constrained custom offerings

9. Unmetered/system networks
Useful for service networks such as monitoring or backup networks which you wouldn’t charge end users for.

10. OVA Appliance support (extraconfig)

11. OVA Appliance support (extraconfig)
Cisco® ASAv
Juniper® vSRX
Cisco® vWAAS (wide-area-application-services)
Riverbed® SteelHead CX

12. Zone or Domain specific disk, compute, network & VPC Offerings
Ie roll out new storage hardware zone by zone. Disk and compute offerings can be created to leverage this hardware and scoped to zones.

13. Hereditary tags on Recurring Snapshots
Allows tags to be set which will be applied to future snapshots

14. Externalised Branding (simpler white labelling)
Shared template support in UI
Many UI tweaks and updates

15. Externalised Branding
Ie roll out new storage hardware zone by zone. Disk and compute offerings can be created to leverage this hardware and scoped to zones.

16. Shared template support in UI
Tucked away in the API, now exposed in the UI. Option (global setting) to enumerate accounts/projects for users to select from.

17. Backup and Recovery
KVM Rolling Maintenance
KVM DRS
VR Health-checks

18. KVM Rolling Maintenance
Select a zone, pod or cluster
Supply upgrade/patching scripts to KVM hosts
Instruct CloudStack to run scripts on the hosts one by one in a cluster, evacuating a host and putting it into maintenance mode where necessary

19. Iterative migration of guest instances to either:
KVM DRS
Iterative migration of guest instances to either:
Balance hosts
Pack hosts
DRS process simplified by
Calculating the most effect guest instance to move
Live migrating it
Checking to see if DRS threshold has be satisfied
If not, calculate the most effect guest instance to move now

20. VR Health-Checks Router periodically running self checks
Management servers periodically polling to ensure checks have run and receive results
Configurable thresholds set to avoid false positives
Alerts raised when checks fail
Automatic VR restarts when specified checks fail.

21. VR Health-Checks
Basic connectivity from management server to virtual router
Basic connectivity to virtual router its interfaces' gateways
Free disk space on virtual router's disk
CPU and memory usage
Basic VR Sanity checks:
dnsmasq/strongswan/haproxy/etc service running
DHCP/DNS config sanity check
Advanced VR Sanity checks:
DHCP/DNS configuration matches mgmt server DB
IPtables rules match management server records
HAproxy config matches mgmt server db records
VM network sanity checks

22. Backup and Recovery

23. Not consistent across volumes
A VM with separate disks for say; OS, logs and data, will have each disk processed at different times
Only crash consistent within a volume and they aren’t application aware
A database will not be quiesced before snapshot is taken
Transaction logs won’t be processed
VMware tools or XenTools may help with some basics
Switch around add volume consistency

24. They can be very slow.
Data has to be transferred from primary storage to secondary storage
In the case of vSphere, this data must go via the SSVM to be compressed into a OVA while being moved to secondary storage.
CloudStack locks out other actions while a snapshot is taking place. Workarounds have their own issues.
Work around async, but means you might try to use a col snapshot that isn’t ready yet.

25. Restoration of a VM requires a number of steps (and did I mention it’s slow)
User must make a template from snapshot (VM image copied via SSVM from one part of secondary storage to another – 2x network transfers)
User then creates VM from template (VM image copied from secondary to primary to create template on primary storage, then primary storage based template copied to make actual VM. 2x network assuming network based primary storage and 1x on-disk copy)
To restore a VM ‘exactly as it was’ requires considerable operator intervention

26. Specifically: Support for:
Operator created ‘policy based’ backups (RPOs)
Scheduled backups (similar to snapshot scheduling)
Ad hoc backups
Backups as first class citizens
‘In-place’ restoration of entire VM including data disks
Restoration of VM backup after original VM is destroyed
Restoration of individual VM volumes (can then be attached to another VM)
Full integration into the CloudStack usage service, recording both protected and on-disk data metrics

27. ‘Policy Based’ Backups
listBackupPolices external=true Returns ‘template’ jobs.
importBackupPolicy Creates a policy (with a name and description) in CloudStack and maps it to a Veeam template job. ie. GOLD – 6hr RPO SILVER – 24hr RPO BRONZE – 7 day RPO

28. ‘Ad-hoc’ & Scheduled Backups
CloudStack will send command to carry out an ad-hoc run of the policy based job or create one as required.
Ad-hoc and scheduled jobs will be driven by CloudStack
One VM to one Veeam job mapping allows for simpler accounting and unified incremental backups

29. Questions ?

30. CloudStack ShapeBlue.com • @ShapeBlue What’s Coming In
Paul Angus, VP Technology • Chair/VP Apache CloudStack