Slides from th

1. C LO U D STAC K
Clayton Weise cweise@iswest.net
IRC: iswcin #cloudstack on freenode

2. LICENSING
 This presentation and it’s contents unless otherwise
noted are released under a Creative Commons
Attributions, Share-Alike 3.0 unported license.

3. H I STO RY
 Original company formed - 2008 (VMOps)
 Project open sourced as CloudStack – May 2010
 Acquired by Citrix – July 2011
 Dropped open core – August 2011
 Release of Acton (3.0) – Real soon now

4. W H AT I S C LO U D STAC K ?
Open Source Infrastructure as a Service platform that
supports multiple hypervisors, complex network, firewall,
load balancer and VPN configurations, high availability, in a
multi-tenant environment.

5. W H AT D O ES I T R EA L LY D O ?
 Provide separation for the varied tenants
 Allocate compute resources in a deterministic manner
 Expose to the end user the ability to provision various
computing services in a controlled manner (VLAN
allocation, firewall rules, load balancer deployment, VM
creation, etc)
 Manage High Availability
 Massively Scalable
 Permit the placement of resource limits to be applied
 Measuring usage over time

6. M U LT I P L E H Y P E RV I S O R S U P P O RT
 KVM
 XenServer
 Xen Cloud Platform
 VMware (via vCenter)
 Oracle VM
 Bare Metal

7. M U LT I - T E N A N T S E PA R AT I O N
 Largely built around abstraction from an end-user POV
 No interaction with hypervisor directly
 No knowledge of underlying storage
 Networking separation
 Every account has at least one dedicated/isolated VLAN
(Tagged Networking)
 Layer 3 isolation aka Security Groups for untagged
networking
 Option to use dedicated hardware

8. N E T WO R K I N G
 CloudStack has a number of network models
 They are generally broken down by:
 Method of isolation (VLAN, Security Groups)
 Physical hardware or virtual
 CloudStack largely manages network infrastructure

9. N E T WO R K I N G
 Services managed by CloudStack
 DHCP
 VLAN allocation
 Firewall
 NAT/Port forwarding
 Routing
 VPN
 Load Balancing

10. N E T WO R K I N G
 CloudStack can also manage physical network hardware
(or the virtualized alternatives)
 F5-Big IP
 NetScaler
 Juniper SRX
 Additionally you can ‘mix and match’ some network
elements as service offerings.

11. S EC U R I T Y G RO U P S
 Traditional isolation has been via VLAN
 VLANs isolate well, but have some problems scaling
 Standard has a hard limit of 4096 VLANs
 Hardware that can actually keep up with 4096 VLANs is
VERY expensive.
 Regardless people tend to not like having arbitrary limits
on what they can do.
 Amazon and others use layer 3 isolation (Security
Groups)

12. S EC U R I T Y G RO U P S
 Assumption of a quasi-trusted Layer 2 network
 Typically will only have hypervisors directly connected to
that network.
 Filtering/isolation occurs at the bridge device (from a
Linux perspective – think ebtables)
 Deny by default

13. S EC U R I T Y G RO U P S

14. S EC U R I T Y G RO U P S

15. H I G H AVA I L A B I L I T Y
 RFMTTR – but apparently HA looks better in marketing
slicks and is used that way across the virtualization
industry.
 CloudStack is not a magical solution for HA – but might
be a useful tool in the process to increase availability.
 CloudStack will watch for HA-enabled VMs to ensure that
they are up, and that the hypervisor it’s on is up – and
will restart on another hypervisor if it goes down.
 Redundant router

16. A L LO C AT I O N A LG O R I T H M S
 How do you place VMs?, allocate storage, etc.
 CloudStack ships with a number of options:
 First Fit
 Fill first
 Disperse
 Create your own
 Tags
 OS Preference

17. U SAG E
 Not billing per se – but does give you something to bill
against.
 Usage stats show VM count, CPU usage, disk allocation
and usage, network usage; all over time.
 Lots of integration and howto’s - from Excel
spreadsheets to Ubersmith, Amysta, and Cloud Portal.

18. H I G H L E V E L A RC H I T EC T U R A L OV E RV I E W
© Copyright David Baird and licensed for reuse under this CC-BY

19. S ECO N DA RY STO R AG E
 Used for storing templates and snapshots
 Historically NFS – just added the option of object storage
 Technically Swift, but Caringo, GlusterFS and others should
work.
 Managed by Secondary Storage VM – manages moving
templates and snapshots from/to primary storage, aging
snapshots out, etc.

20. P R I M A RY STO R AG E
 In the UI we support NFS, iSCSI, and CLVM.
 We can also make use of local storage
 No HA, no live migration, etc.
 Shared mountpoint
 Anything that all the hypervisors can mount and write to.

21. R ES O U RC E D I V I S I O N
 We have some somewhat arbitrary divisions of resources
within CloudStack
 Zones
• Pods
– Clusters

22. ZO N E
 In general practice this is used to designate a specific
geographic location.
 Shares secondary storage resource across the entire zone
 Single network model for the entire zone

23. POD
 In general practice – this is used to refer a rack of
machines or a row of racks.
 Shares guest network

24. C LU ST E R
 This is typically a max of 8-15 machines per cluster and
homogenity is enforced:
 Same hypervisor (and same version of the hypervisor)
 Same CPUs
 Same networking (i.e. /dev/eth0 is connected to the same
network across all machines)
 Primary storage is cluster specific

25. P L E T H O R A O F N E T WO R KS
 Management Network: Where the hypervisors and
management server communicate
 Private Network: Default network for system VMs.
(virtual router, secondary storage VM, Console proxy VM)
 Public Network: The public (often internet-facing
network)
 Guest Network: The network that VMs are provisioned
on.
 Link-local network: The RFC 3927 network used for
communication between hypervisor and system VMs.

26. M A N AG E M E N T S E RV E R
 UI/API pieces are stateless (state is stored in a MySQL
database.
 All UI functionality is an API call

27. API
 RESTful API interface
 Unauthenticated API interace on 8096 (for localhost)
 Authenticated API interface natively on port 8080
 Responses in XML or JSON
 http://demo4.cloudstack.org/client/api?apikey=ZRFLiXIkm
AHqgRmZzdiXMfaROyK35P_dXxS517WSa9Tmy1Hg&comm
and=deployVirtualMachine&serviceofferingid=1&template
id=291&zoneid=1&signature=eXW%2fxfqx%2fhu%2frMreF
ksVsp3cT4M%3d

28. UI
 Go play with the UI

29. Q U EST I O N S
 ASK!

30. CO N TAC T
 http://cloudstack.org
 Docs: https://cwiki.apache.org/CLOUDSTACK
 IRC: #cloudstack on Freenode
 Twitter/identi.ca: @cloudstack
 Mailing Lists
 https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cloudstack-users
 https://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cloudstack-devel
 Forums