Head in the Clouds

One of the most powerful but lesser known features of CloudStack is it's ability to integrate with networking devices like F5 and NetScaler loadbalancers. 

With CloudStack 3.0 you can deploy NetScaler with core Load Balancing rules. The core protocols like TCP, HTTP and UDP are supported and you can use the load balancing algorithms like Round Robin, Source IP and Least connection. It also supports session persistency based on Source IP and Cookie.

There's a nice overview of how that works over on the Citrix blog. 

For those of you that are Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) users and are in Silicon Valley the CloudStack community team and some of our developers will be attending the Xen Hackathon at Oracle in Silicon Valley on March 6th-8th. If you want to help make Xen Cloud Platform a better hypervisor for your cloud come on in the XCP project lead Mike McClurg will be there as well for you to discuss where XCP is going. 

What is a Xen Hackathon?

The aim of Xen Hackathons is to give developers in the Xen community the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other Xen developers. It is a 3 day self-organizing event, where Xen developers work on concrete problems around the Xen codebase in small self-organizing groups.

Xen developers with the following expertise will be present: Xen Hypervisor developers, kernel developers (working on Xen components in the Linux kernel), XCP developers working on project Kronos and the Xen Cloud Platform. Xen on ARM as well is MIPS will also feature in the March 2012 Hackathon.

Xen Hackathons are also great opportunities for companies and open source projects, built on Xen, XCP or commercially based Xen products to test (and fix any issues in their products) against the latest open source baselines. You will have access and be able to work on concrete code problems with Xen developers at the Hackathon.

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On February 28th and 29th we'll be holding a two day session focusing on the open source technologies you can use to build, manage and deploy an open source cloud compute environment as well as DevOps presentation on operational methodologies for managing "cloudy" infrastructure.  The program will feature speakers from CloudStack, Citrix, Xen.org, Red Hat, Gluster, PuppetLabs, Opscode, Zenoss and enStratus. 

Even if you can't attend all the sessions feel free to sign-up and we'll make our best effort to get you links to recordings and slide decks after the event.

Day 1 Agenda

Day 1 of Build an Open Source Cloud Day will focus on the infrastructure that compromises an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing environment. The speakers will outline options for virtualization, storage and orchestration that provide the foundation for an open source cloud compute environment.

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CloudStack is please to announce the release of version 2.2.14. This
release is largely a bugfix release.

While most of our development effort seems to have been directed at
the upcoming Acton (3.0) release as seen by the plethora of
pre-release builds, we have continued to work on the 2.2 CloudStack
releases, fixing bugs and increasing stability.

You can find binaries here:
http://bit.ly/ziBbrE


Release notes (PDF) are here:
http://bit.ly/xbOHCo

You will note that the community has added Portuguese and French
language support to the UI

You will also note that there are separate binaries for EL6.0, EL6.1 and
EL6.2, please make the correct choice if applicable.

For those of you who have attended a past Build an Open Source Cloud Day (BACD) you know we draw some of the most knowledgable speakers on open source technologies related to systems management and cloud computing. Here are some of the recent presentations from our Build a Cloud Day series please stay tuned to our Events pages to see a BACD event coming to a location near you.

• Crash Course on Open Source Cloud Computing, Mark Hinkle, CloudStack.org
• Xen Cloud Platform, Lars Kurth, Xen.org
• Introduction to CloudStack, David Nalley, CloudStack.org 
• Cloud Monitoring with Zenoss Core, David Nalley, Zenoss Master 
• Rapid Scaling in the Cloud with Puppet, Carl Caum, PuppetLabs
• Devops, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet, Kris Buytaert, Inuits
• Introduction to Chef, Matt Ray, Opscode