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. 

this tips will be useful especially in the test and evaluation stage from a CloudStack project.

ok, here we go!

The resource_count table contains the quantity of  user_vm, public_ip, volume, snapshot,  template and the first acction is add the user_vm and volumes to another account, here's a example.

mysql> select * from resource_count where account_id = 22;
+-------+-------------+--------------+----------------+--------+
| id  | account_id | domain_id | type    |count |
+-------+-------------+--------------+----------------+--------+
| 151 |         22 |      NULL | user_vm   |     1  |
| 152 |         22 |      NULL | public_ip  |     0  |
| 153 |         22 |      NULL | volume     |     2  |
| 154 |         22 |      NULL | snapshot  |     0  |
| 155 |         22 |      NULL | template   |     0  |

A few months back during Cloud Expo, I had a chance to talk with Alex Bederov from Nokia and he showed me a spreadsheet that Nokia was using to analyze the usage reports from CloudStack. I thought this was fascinating, particularly from a private cloud perspective. While there are products like Amysta or CloudPortal that handle taking the usage records and billing against them, private clouds typically don't need that same level of billing services. This is a wonderful middle ground. In the interim Alex has written up his way of interacting with CloudStack usage database - and we've now published it as a KB article 

http://docs.cloud.com/Knowledge_Base/Using_Microsoft_Excel_to_analyze_CloudStack_usage_records

Alex was quite nice and even provided a sample spreadsheet to look at, and it's linked at the bottom of the KB article. 

Hopefully this will benefit a lot of folks just looking to do some basic reporting against the usage database. 

High Availability is one of those things often touted by cloud pundits as one of the miracle features of 'the cloud'. As a recovering sysadmin, things like availability, uptime, mean time to recovery, fault tolerance, and redundancy are near and dear to my heart.

How services and applications are built and used is changing. The older way of thinking, was to centralize everything, buy the most reliable hardware you could get and that is as available as you could make things. (Read that as closer to mainframe thinking) And that type of thinking generally worked (and still does in many cases) OK - but it's not without problems; Namely, it's expensive and failure still occurs.

As the industry has continued down the consumption of computing services pathway the need for reliability has grown exponentially. People want and need better reliability - and the old way of 'ensuring' availability doesn't scale very well. That led us to what most people talk about when they consider HA today. Much less expensive machines but using redundancy in components - and actually architecting High Availability at the software level. This led to things like Linux-HA, Pacemaker, Zookeeper, Corosync, etc. and to applications and services designing some of their own distributed (and thus more highly-available) capabilities - such as database replication, web load balancing, etc.

Real HA comes from proper architecting. We are moving away from a critical application running on a single piece of hardware. Folks have started to realize, through the pioneering work of folks like Amazon, Netlfix, and Zynga, that failure is assured. Trying to avoid failure is fruitless - embracing failure and architecting systems to expect, and properly react to failure is the path to availability.

Along the path, HA became a buzzword, and is still one of those essential checkboxes that must be completed for enterprise computing purchases. Like cloud-washing that we see so much of now, it has led to some abuse of the term, and over time the term has changed meanings. This is pretty taxing on people who actually care about the underlying technology. But this post isn't a rant about buzzword-washing and definition dilution - it's about HA in the cloud.

Hi everyone!

We had an awesome time at the Silicon Valley Cloud Expo! Thanks to those that visited our CloudStack booth, participated in our sessions and attended our personal lunch and learn.

During the expo, we had a lot of questions and discussions on a variety of aspects around cloud computing and CloudStack. We also had a lot of end-users visiting our booth interested in getting specific information (i.e., how to get started, networking, best practices) to take back home. We took some notes and will be creating various interactive video and sneak peaks series over the next couple of months to shower you with CloudStack goodies.

Just in time for the holidays, we’re treating you to a 7-part series on networking with CloudStack. Over the next few weeks, this series will have our resident CloudStack community “guy” David Nalley and Product Architect Chiradeep Vittal illustrate some of the common network topologies and features that CloudStack supports. They will identify some networking challenges in cloud computing and provide best practices and use cases on how to leverage Cloudstack to overcome them. This video series is a must-see for developers and network/systems architects, or anyone interested in Cloud computing!

Episode 1: Introduction to Network Services with CloudStack