CloudStack Reviews

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.

We have created a zone-based setup in Cloudstack where each zone represents a physical datacentre. Each zone has a few servers/hypervisors with predefined VM templates.

We have a portal where a user just clicks a few times and gets a VM ready for use. We use API in the background, which gives instructions to Cloudstack to produce the desired results.

Cloud computing has improved the way our organization functions. With virtualization, physical hardware has been replaced with virtual devices hosted on CloudStack. What CloudStack does is make the management of servers and VMs easy and centralized.

Also it has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc.

We use CloudStack because it is simpler than OpenStack and has most features required to be an IaaS orchestration tool.

• CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas.
• It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs.
• While OpenStack has different components and related DB and conf files, which is difficult to manage, CloudStack has just one database and few related conf files located in a single directory.
• Most logs are generated at a single location, which makes troubleshooting easier.

This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc.

Also, it is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active.

Yes, we encountered stability issues. We were using an older version on which, when we restarted the CloudStack management service, the connection would break between CloudStack and KVM hosts. This resulted in VM deployment failure. The issue was resolved after updating to the new version.

No issue with scalability.

We don’t have CloudStack support. We manage it on our own.

We were using VMware and Xen earlier, but to reduce the cost and to make management simple, everything has been moved to KVM and CloudStack. Both KVM and CloudStack are free.

We are not using the licensed version.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because it is has most features you would expect from an orchestration tool, but less complexity.

We use Apache CloudStack to host and orchestrate all of our virtual environments. We host both internal virtual machines and customer virtual machines.

It allowed us to build and manage a virtual environment much larger than we originally thought would be possible for our organization. It also gives us the ability to rapidly deploy virtual resources to meet business needs quickly.

The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds.

The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product.

I would rate this an eight out of 10. It is a great solution for virtual hypervisor orchestration. It is purpose-built for our environment and does very well if you have the time to manage your environment.

We’ve been using some form of CloudStack in our environment since 2012. It has become an integral part of how we provide critical services to our customers.

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.