CloudStack Reviews

Legacy support for a previous CloudStack environment.

It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution.

• Stability
• Centralized management design that scales well
• Transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers

We also have OpenStack in production, but many of our staff members prefer CloudStack for the reasons mentioned above (less complexity, less failure-prone). There are reasons we use both though – different workloads on different systems.

Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery.

We had some issues with XenServer an OVS, but that wasn’t really a CloudStack problem.

No scalability issues. CloudStack has actually scaled quite well for our needs.  Even though it’s more monolithic in design compared to OpenStack, we have had no issues scaling, and it actually scales with far less complexity as a result.

Community support is very good, but after Citrix divested CloudPlatform to Accelerite, commercial support was absolutely atrocious. We actually investigated third parties like ShapeBlue because the support from Accelerite was so bad and made the decision to part ways with Accelerite completely when our contract was up for renewal.

Complex, but all clouds are complex so that is to be expected. I and one other community member actually write a bunch of documentation for first-timers to help them through the process, because the networking always threw everybody.

Obviously OSS is free, so you can’t beat that when it comes to price. For the commercial support options, they are extremely fair for quality of the solution.

Yes, we evaluated other solutions, and we run CloudStack along with OpenStack in two different environments for different reasons. In general, my preference is for CloudStack because it is less complex, has fewer moving parts and has demonstrated better stability for our needs.

I have used it for close to eight years, since Cloud.com, prior to the Citrix acquisition.

Get commercial assistance from an experienced consultant who has deployed it before. Choices made early on in a cloud deployment can lock you into a design that may be undesirable in the future, but near impossible to change if implemented incorrectly early on.

Development and test environment for customer.

We saved on cost of hardware.

You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs.

The zones need to be more stable. During moving and first deployment there were a lot of issues.

The account concept and usage database made billing integration straight forward. The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough. In my experience, customers appreciated the console proxy for initial set up and emergency situations.

We made money off of it. For our customers, it enabled them to spend a lot less money when compared to a full-blown infrastructure implementation, without drudging through the complexity of AWS.

• CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry.
• Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack.
• Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS.
• The back-end database design is simple and straight forward.
• The user interface is designed with external users in mind.
• Billing is relatively straightforward with this product.
• Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice.

With all that simplicity come limitations that need to be understood and planned for:

• Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private.
• The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn. It’s still easier to use than the competition but it used to be even simpler, in older versions of CloudStack.
• Cloud routers have always been lacking. They’re fine for public cloud applications but again, for private enterprise use cases, object-based firewalls are pretty important for large, complex set ups. If that sounds like too much of a lift, a description field would be a good Band-aid.

I’ve used, managed, and integrated it for about seven years in three different mid-sized companies. I started using CloudStack before Citrix acquired Cloud.com.

I used Apache CloudStack as an academic project, for setting up the environments for a school's infrastructure, and not for specific applications' usage.

My experience with CloudStack was part of my academic experience in my college. It eventually did not end up being used practically, it was showcased as a research project.

I think CloudStack needs to promote itself better, since I believe it a better solution than OpenStack. However, the latter has been more successfully commercially.

I have also explored setting up with OpenStack and I found it harder to use than CloudStack.

I would rate Apache CloudStack at seven out of 10, compared with six out of 10 for OpenStack. 

We use it for our enterprise cloud.

All our development is done on this environment because we deploy around 3,000 instances every day. We couldn’t do that on any public service because of the budget.

The feature of the Apache CloudStack, IaaS.

Multi-deployments.

CloudStack is our private IaaS cloud which helps us manage resource usage in our company. It is also a great PoC environment.

It gives us a new way of providing IaaS services internally, for different departments. Also, CloudStack is providing us much more profit than OpenStack.

• User-friendly portal
• VPN P2S and S2S possibilities
• Easy to manage accounts and limits

1. VPN P2S: It's cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect.
2. It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network.
3. From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2.
4. I would like to have billing built in as a feature.
5. Integration with some backup software.

The system is stable, I haven't faced any problems with it. The organization of management is simple and clear.

It’s hard to say because I have quite a small environment. But adding nodes to the cluster/POD was done without any problems.

I haven’t used technical support, but what is really good that there is a lot of written use cases within the network. I think this is more than enough.

OpenStack was my first implementation but it’s really difficult to manage. The installation required a lot of resources just to start the platform, and the user experience was totally unsatisfactory.

After that I tried Azure Stack just for testing, but it’s also very heavy.

It was easy and took no more than an hour (including HA configuration).

Every infrastructure is different, and company policies are also different. I can’t advise in a general way here. I can only say that KVM and Citrix, as a hypervisors, are very stable with CLoudStack. The rest is up to the architecting fantasy of the administrator.

This solution really works. That’s it.

Primary use case of is set up deploy for testing team's artifacts. Usually it has 8-16 RAM, ~80 HDD.

CloudStack helps to keep the administration process for all virtual machines in one place.

The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window.

It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance).

Also, I would like to see the possibility of resetting password for instance without stopping it.

Only once, an instance with VM on Windows Server was rebooted without any action from my side.

No issues with scalability.

I have never used technical support.

Regarding the first creation of an instance in CloudStack, I would say that it is rather straightforward. I was faced with a non-activated network within a VM and it took a little time to find and fix it.

In general I would to say CS is a stable solution and, in my opinion, it will solve problems with administration of VMs.

My company has developed solutions like user-friendly control portals and billing portals for CloudStack. Also we were providing infrastructure support for CloudStack-based IaaS platforms for a few of our clients. We used most possible cases like LDAP integrations, RBAC, etc., with CloudStack. We created multi-zone infrastructure with CloudStack and it was working great.

We acquired some good clients for our billing and control portal solutions with CloudStack and it improved our business greatly. 

Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features, in my opinion. Also, there are shared network features - LB, VPN, etc. - which are very useful for every user.

For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement.

I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources. Other than that everything was fine.

No, I did not face any issues scalability issues.

Since it is an open-source product, we did not approach any technical support specifically. But the CloudStack forums and ShapeBlue forums are very helpful for many of the issues we faced. Sometimes we got exact solutions from the forums.

Straightforward, a very simple process.

It's an open-source product, so there won't be any pricing. For licensing, it uses Apache open-source license.

I rate it at five out of 10. For a private cloud, CloudStack is good and fine, but for public cloud, it will not be that a great experience, in my opinion. CloudStack is good for private cloud, simple to install and set up.

If you are planning for a public cloud with microservices architecture, go for OpenStack. CloudStack is a monolithic architecutred solution to manage cloud  infra and sometimes it will be difficult to pick and fix a single component from CloudStack.