UPDATED 13:12 EDT / OCTOBER 08 2013

NEWS

Apache CloudStack 4.2.0 Brings Open Source Compute, Storage and Networking Cloud Platform in One

The open-source Apache Foundation announced the release of Apache CloudStack 4.2.0, a scaling construct for the cloud platform. The Apache CloudStack 4.2.0 cloud platform delivers across the board improvements for the cloud computing platform and is the third for the open-source project since it became part of the Apache Software Foundation in November of 2012 with its 4.0 release.

The free software is written in Java, which is designed to implement and manage large networks of virtual machines, as highly available, fully scalable cloud computing platform. Currently CloudStack is supported by the most popular hypervisor player such as VMware ESX / ESXi, Oracle VM, KVM, XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform.

This release represents over six months of work from the Apache CloudStack community with 57 new and 29 improved features being provided. Many new features including integrated support of the Cisco UCS compute chassis, SolidFire storage arrays, and the S3 storage protocol are available in this release.

The cloud platform is built on Citrix CloudStack Apache, open source project that the company broke into the OpenStack community. Citrix donated the product to Apache Software Foundation (ASF), where it became an ASF top-level project. CloudStack is a technology that has its roots in technology vendor Cloud.com, which was acquired by Citrix in 2010.

Faster installation, better scaling

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) software platform allows users to build feature-rich public and private cloud environments. CloudStack includes an intuitive user interface and rich APIs for managing the compute, networking, software, and storage infrastructure resources.

Apache made the upgradation of 4.2 less complex by reducing the number of required moving parts, and by the community-provided Linux packages.

CloudStack 4.2 includes more than 70 new features and enhancements. To increase reliability of the cloud, CloudStack is also now designed to scale that much more efficiently thanks to Amazon-style Regions. CloudStack 4.2 offers grouping of resources into geographic regions. What it effectively provides are the mechanisms to support federation of multiple CloudStack management server clusters into a cohesive cloud. Regions are a useful technique for providing fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Usage records can also be consolidated and tracked at the region level, creating reports or invoices for each geographic region.

CloudStack is now able to support zone-wide primary storage volumes for the open-source KVM and VMware ESX hypervisors. This will make it easier for operators to manage storage capacity separately from compute capacity within their zones.

Apache has also started with support for IPv6 on the public network side of the environment, and will be working toward v6 enablement on private guest networks as well as on the management networks in later phases.

CloudStack 4.2 supports Persistent Networks. With the addition of this feature, IT administrator will have the ability to create a network in CloudStack in which physical devices can be deployed without having to run any VMs. In addition, the newest release structures load balancing support for VPC, load balancing within a tier, enhanced access control list, deploying VMs to a VPC tier and shared networks.

Apache has a very strong record of releasing open source project and take it forward. The CloudStack. The platform is used by many organizations, powering everything from large-scale public cloud providers, to small dev/test lab infrastructure, and everything in between. CloudPlatform, the commercial arm of CloudStack run by Citrix, is in use at over 130 organizations.


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