CloudStack Reviews

The main goal was to have an IaaS solution which could be supported by a small number of people and which matches our business logic for internal units. In the end, CloudStack was deployed  as a private cloud, across three datacenters with different hardware vendors (HPE, Dell, Cisco Blades, EMC, and Supermicro storage) and advanced networking. It's more then 100 hosts (including DR) and more then 1,000 instances deployed. Final design included automatic limits configuration and access management.

We managed to avoid additional expenses for orchestration and automation tools.

Killer features for me were: 

• Support for many hypervisors
• ability to match business logic
• "everything in one box"
• available APIs.

The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging. This is most painful point here.

We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level. But considering so many points of failure and dependencies on infrastructure, they could figure out something. This was another reason why we planned migration to SOA.

CS itself provides quite powerful options to scale: availability zones, clusters, etc. One main issue encountered: It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented, a couple of years ago.

CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them. At the end, CS is “script box.”

We used OnApp for cloud. It is deployed on premises, and paid, and still it did not give us flexibility. For example, we couldn’t export VMs, CLI capabilities were limited, only Xen hypervisors.

It was complex for three reasons:

1. I had to match business logic, so initial testing came in.
2. To make it work properly, I had to figure out how it exactly interacts with hypervisors, and rules for that. It was not clearly described at that time.
3. Sensitive environment, so if you make a mistake during the initial configuration, get ready to start from the beginning.

As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion.

We were looking for a solution on premises, and I reviewed OpenStack “zoo” before making my final decision. As I mentioned, CS can be managed by small number of people, unlike OpenStack.

We have been using CS for three years. I started a small PoC with a few VMware hosts. At the end, I had three production instances with VMware and XenServers.

I would rate CloudStack as a six out of 10. Main pros: You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors. Main concern: Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything. 

It's very important to understand CS rules and baseline for them.

Make proper estimations for everything: networking, storage, performance (primary and  secondary) and then add 20% to your estimates. CS is good for private clouds, but I would never use it for public clouds.

We are an ISP in Brazil. We have started to offer IaaS to the market and our current customers. We implemented ACS in our datacenter starting with a zone, pod, and cluster. We also developed an eCommerce/user interface at the top of the Apache CloudStack platform.

We increased our IaaS sales by 30% and our deploy time of VM/instances has been reduced from one day to one minute. We also had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks.

• CloudStack is very stable and scalable. 
• It uses a single code/project differently from other platforms, like OpenStack.
• It is very simple to implement and maintain.

The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays.

We had only one problem with the hypervisors, but not with the ACS.

No issues. The platform is very simple to scale-out.

We use only the community, as we have inside technical skills, and it works very well.

We did not use a previous solution.

It is not complex, but has some little tricks.

We contracted a specialized company called ShapeBlue for the first design of the environment, then we deployed it ourselves.

The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase.

Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.

We evaluated OpenStack and Eucalyptus. 

The most valuable features are:

• Compatibility with various hypervisors such as Xen, KVM, vSphere, and Hyper-V.
• Support for multiple availability zones.
• Structured REST API and integration with virtual appliance vendors solutions.

CloudStack has reduced the time to market for the delivery of new products.

Factors that need improvement are:

• Visualization in terms of the resources usage.
• The user interface.
• Providing best error feedback to the users.

I've used CloudStack for three years for the private cloud environments.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The main support for this platform is the community of developments and the users involved with this open-source project.

It is my first solution to manage the on-premise environments.

The initial setup is actually pretty easy because CloudStack has a monolithic, all-in-one architecture.

We looked at OpenStack and VMware.

Reduction in the time for the presentation of new improvements.

API support, LB-integration with NetScaler for auto-scaling support, and the flexibility to configure/represent the physical network (VPC, guest and network offerings). NFV light making it possible to have LB, FW, PortFoward and private networks is also very useful.

It helps some business areas to test their ideas and innovation initiatives with freedom and more speed (and better time to market).

More integration with third-party products (we know that OpenStack has a better level of integration).

3 years.

No.

No.

Very nice. We can leverage community forums and we had some support from ShapeBlue.

We've tested OpenStack, VMware vCloud Director and VMware Cloud Automation Center. We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead.

It was simple, taking into consideration that any private cloud deployment is intrinsically complex. We could manage to decrease the network complexity representing the physical network with VLANs mapping to guest, isolated and VPC networks.

Openstack, vCloud Director and vCAC.

Attention to network design and secondary storage.

It is easy to set up, unlike OpenStack (in 2013). It provides good KVM virtualization support.

The advanced network allows for creating a private network for better isolation of VMs.

CloudStack provides an easy way to have high availability (HA) of the virtual machines and helps with a better SLA.

The web UI can be improved. It is too complex, and not trivial for the average user.

Since 2013, I have been using Apache CloudStack 4.1.1.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have contributed to the CloudStack project at ASF; I'm a PMC member, so the support is self-made.

The setup was straightforward. The installation guide is easy to follow. The concepts are easy to understand and are based on the standard mechanisms.

It's free (open source).

I have used KVM or XenServer as hypervisors with CloudStack. These virtualization technologies are most supported on CloudStack.

Easy installation and simple IAAS cloud management.

The product has been evolving over the years. Several new features like LDAP integration, quota management, and RBAC have been added over last few years.

The upgrade process can be improved further. There are two parts to the upgrade. One is to upgrade the CloudStack management server. That is desirable in terms of auto updates and more user friendly UI to manage updates. Then there is this whole system VM template upgrade procedure that sounds technical, although it has been improving over the years with more automation and mirror selection that could be more desirable.

We have been using this solution for four years.

The product is stable. There were times where longer running operation could run into issues. Some of these stability related problems have been fixed in newer releases.

With the scale that we operate, I have not encountered issues with scalability. CloudStack manages infrastructure with 2-4 thousands of hosts easily.

The community is active and the response to questions is reasonably quick. There are also several companies providing support for CloudStack.

We have been on CloudStack since the start.

The initial setup was simple compared to competitive products.

It is an open source product and comes free under license from the Apache foundation. If you need dedicated support or training, then you may have to pay. It depends on how you go about it.

We have looked at OpenStack. At that time, it appeared to have been receiving more traction. But we found installation and operation more complex, compared to the simplicity of CloudStack. CloudStack installation is simple and it works.

If you are looking for a private cloud, just go for CloudStack.