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What is Apache CloudStack?
--------------------------

Apache CloudStack is an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform that 
manages and orchestrates pools of storage, network, and computer resources to 
build a public or private IaaS compute cloud. 

With CloudStack you can:

-  Set up an on-demand elastic cloud computing service. 

-  Allow end-users to provision resources


What can Apache CloudStack do?
------------------------------

Multiple Hypervisor Support
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack works with a variety of hypervisors and hypervisor-like 
technologies. A single cloud can contain multiple hypervisor implementations. 
As of the current release CloudStack supports: 

-  BareMetal (via IPMI)

-  Hyper-V

-  KVM

-  LXC

-  vSphere (via vCenter)

-  Xenserver

-  Xen Project


Massively Scalable Infrastructure Management
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack can manage tens of thousands of physical servers installed in 
geographically distributed datacenters. The management server scales 
near-linearly eliminating the need for cluster-level management servers. 
Maintenance or other outages of the management server can occur without 
affecting the virtual machines running in the cloud. 


Automatic Cloud Configuration Management
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack automatically configures the network and storage settings for each 
virtual machine deployment. Internally, a pool of virtual appliances support 
the operation of configuration of the cloud itself. These appliances offer 
services such as firewalling, routing, DHCP, VPN, console proxy, storage 
access, and storage replication. The extensive use of horizontally scalable 
virtual machines simplifies the installation and ongoing operation of a cloud. 


Graphical User Interface
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack offers an administrators web interface used for provisioning and 
managing the cloud, as well as an end-user's Web interface, used for running 
VMs and managing VM templates. The UI can be customized to reflect the desired 
service provider or enterprise look and feel.


API
~~~

CloudStack provides a REST-like API for the operation, management and use of 
the cloud. 


AWS EC2 API Support
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack provides an EC2 API translation layer to permit the common EC2 
tools to be used in the use of a CloudStack cloud. 


High Availability
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack has a number of features to increase the availability of the 
system. The Management Server itself may be deployed in a multi-node 
installation where the servers are load balanced. MySQL may be configured to 
use replication to provide for failover in the event of database loss. For the 
hosts, CloudStack supports NIC bonding and the use of separate networks for 
storage as well as iSCSI Multipath.


Deployment Architecture Overview
--------------------------------

Generally speaking, most CloudStack deployments consist of the management 
server and the resources to be managed. During deployment you inform the 
management server of the resources to be managed, such as IP address blocks, 
storage devices, hypervisors, and VLANs. 

The minimum installation consists of one machine running the CloudStack 
Management Server and another machine to act as the cloud infrastructure (in 
this case, a very simple infrastructure consisting of one host running 
hypervisor software). In its smallest deployment, a single machine can act as 
both the Management Server and the hypervisor host (using the KVM hypervisor).

.. image:: /_static/images/basic-deployment.png

A more full-featured installation consists of a highly-available multi-node 
Management Server installation and up to tens of thousands of hosts using any 
of several networking technologies.


Management Server Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The management server orchestrates and allocates the resources in your cloud 
deployment.

The management server typically runs on a dedicated machine or as a virtual 
machine.  It controls allocation of virtual machines to hosts and assigns 
storage and IP addresses to the virtual machine instances. The Management 
Server runs in an Apache Tomcat container and requires a MySQL database for 
persistence.

The management server:

-  Provides the web interface for both the adminstrator and end user. 

-  Provides the API interfaces for both the CloudStack API as well as the EC2 
   interface. 

-  Manages the assignment of guest VMs to a specific compute resource

-  Manages the assignment of public and private IP addresses. 

-  Allocates storage during the VM instantiation process. 

-  Manages snapshots, disk images (templates), and ISO images. 

-  Provides a single point of configuration for your cloud.

.. _infrastructure-overview:

Cloud Infrastructure Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Resources within the cloud are managed as follows: 

-  Regions: A collection of one or more geographically proximate zones managed 
   by one or more management servers. 

-  Zones: Typically, a zone is equivalent to a single datacenter. A zone 
   consists of one or more pods and secondary storage.

-  Pods: A pod is usually a rack, or row of racks that includes a layer-2 
   switch and one or more clusters.

-  Clusters: A cluster consists of one or more homogenous hosts and primary 
   storage. 

-  Host: A single compute node within a cluster; often a hypervisor. 

-  Primary Storage: A storage resource typically provided to a single cluster 
   for the actual running of instance disk images. (Zone-wide primary storage 
   is an option, though not typically used.)

-  Secondary Storage: A zone-wide resource which stores disk templates, ISO 
   images, and snapshots. 


Networking Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CloudStack offers many types of networking, but they typically fall into one 
of two scenarios: 

-  Basic: Most analogous to AWS-classic style networking. Provides a single 
   flat layer-2 network where guest isolation is provided at layer-3 by the 
   hypervisors bridge device. 

-  Advanced: This typically uses layer-2 isolation such as VLANs, though this 
   category also includes SDN technologies such as Nicira NVP.


CloudStack Terminology
----------------------

.. _about-regions:

About Regions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To increase reliability of the cloud, you can optionally group resources
into multiple geographic regions. A region is the largest available
organizational unit within a CloudStack deployment. A region is made up
of several availability zones, where each zone is roughly equivalent to
a datacenter. Each region is controlled by its own cluster of Management
Servers, running in one of the zones. The zones in a region are
typically located in close geographical proximity. Regions are a useful
technique for providing fault tolerance and disaster recovery.

By grouping zones into regions, the cloud can achieve higher
availability and scalability. User accounts can span regions, so that
users can deploy VMs in multiple, widely-dispersed regions. Even if one
of the regions becomes unavailable, the services are still available to
the end-user through VMs deployed in another region. And by grouping
communities of zones under their own nearby Management Servers, the
latency of communications within the cloud is reduced compared to
managing widely-dispersed zones from a single central Management Server.

Usage records can also be consolidated and tracked at the region level,
creating reports or invoices for each geographic region.

.. figure:: /_static/images/region-overview.png


Regions are visible to the end user. When a user starts a guest VM on a
particular CloudStack Management Server, the user is implicitly
selecting that region for their guest. Users might also be required to
copy their private templates to additional regions to enable creation of
guest VMs using their templates in those regions.


.. _about-zones:

About Zones
~~~~~~~~~~~

A zone is the second largest organizational unit within a CloudStack
deployment. A zone typically corresponds to a single datacenter,
although it is permissible to have multiple zones in a datacenter. The
benefit of organizing infrastructure into zones is to provide physical
isolation and redundancy. For example, each zone can have its own power
supply and network uplink, and the zones can be widely separated
geographically (though this is not required).

A zone consists of:

-  One or more pods. Each pod contains one or more clusters of hosts and
   one or more primary storage servers.

-  A zone may contain one or more primary storage servers, which are
   shared by all the pods in the zone.

-  Secondary storage, which is shared by all the pods in the zone.

.. figure:: /_static/images/zone-overview.png

Zones are visible to the end user. When a user starts a guest VM, the
user must select a zone for their guest. Users might also be required to
copy their private templates to additional zones to enable creation of
guest VMs using their templates in those zones.

Zones can be public or private. Public zones are visible to all users.
This means that any user may create a guest in that zone. Private zones
are reserved for a specific domain. Only users in that domain or its
subdomains may create guests in that zone.

Hosts in the same zone are directly accessible to each other without
having to go through a firewall. Hosts in different zones can access
each other through statically configured VPN tunnels.

For each zone, the administrator must decide the following.

-  How many pods to place in each zone.

-  How many clusters to place in each pod.

-  How many hosts to place in each cluster.

-  (Optional) How many primary storage servers to place in each zone and
   total capacity for these storage servers.

-  How many primary storage servers to place in each cluster and total
   capacity for these storage servers.

-  How much secondary storage to deploy in a zone.

When you add a new zone using the CloudStack UI, you will be prompted to
configure the zone’s physical network and add the first pod, cluster,
host, primary storage, and secondary storage.

In order to support zone-wide functions for VMware, CloudStack is aware
of VMware Datacenters and can map each Datacenter to a CloudStack zone.
To enable features like storage live migration and zone-wide primary
storage for VMware hosts, CloudStack has to make sure that a zone
contains only a single VMware Datacenter. Therefore, when you are
creating a new CloudStack zone, you can select a VMware Datacenter for
the zone. If you are provisioning multiple VMware Datacenters, each one
will be set up as a single zone in CloudStack.

.. note::
   If you are upgrading from a previous CloudStack version, and your existing 
   deployment contains a zone with clusters from multiple VMware Datacenters, 
   that zone will not be forcibly migrated to the new model. It will continue 
   to function as before. However, any new zone-wide operations, such as 
   zone-wide primary storage and live storage migration, will not be available 
   in that zone.

.. _about-pods:

About Pods
~~~~~~~~~~

A pod often represents a single rack. Hosts in the same pod are in the
same subnet. A pod is the third-largest organizational unit within a
CloudStack deployment. Pods are contained within zones. Each zone can
contain one or more pods. A pod consists of one or more clusters of
hosts and one or more primary storage servers. Pods are not visible to
the end user.

.. figure:: /_static/images/pod-overview.png

.. _about-clusters:

About Clusters
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A cluster provides a way to group hosts. To be precise, a cluster is a
XenServer server pool, a set of KVM servers, , or a VMware cluster
preconfigured in vCenter. The hosts in a cluster all have identical
hardware, run the same hypervisor, are on the same subnet, and access
the same shared primary storage. Virtual machine instances (VMs) can be
live-migrated from one host to another within the same cluster, without
interrupting service to the user.

A cluster is the fourth-largest organizational unit within a CloudStack
deployment. Clusters are contained within pods, and pods are contained
within zones. Size of the cluster is limited by the underlying
hypervisor, although the CloudStack recommends less in most cases; see
Best Practices.

A cluster consists of one or more hosts and one or more primary storage
servers.

.. figure:: /_static/images/cluster-overview.png

CloudStack allows multiple clusters in a cloud deployment.

Even when local storage is used exclusively, clusters are still required
organizationally, even if there is just one host per cluster.

When VMware is used, every VMware cluster is managed by a vCenter
server. An Administrator must register the vCenter server with
CloudStack. There may be multiple vCenter servers per zone. Each vCenter
server may manage multiple VMware clusters.

.. _about-hosts:

About Hosts
~~~~~~~~~~~

A host is a single computer. Hosts provide the computing resources that
run guest virtual machines. Each host has hypervisor software installed
on it to manage the guest VMs. For example, a host can be a Citrix
XenServer server, a Linux KVM-enabled server, an ESXi server, or a
Windows Hyper-V server.

The host is the smallest organizational unit within a CloudStack
deployment. Hosts are contained within clusters, clusters are contained
within pods, pods are contained within zones, and zones can be contained
within regions.

Hosts in a CloudStack deployment:

-  Provide the CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources needed to
   host the virtual machines

-  Interconnect using a high bandwidth TCP/IP network and connect to the
   Internet

-  May reside in multiple data centers across different geographic
   locations

-  May have different capacities (different CPU speeds, different
   amounts of RAM, etc.), although the hosts within a cluster must all
   be homogeneous

Additional hosts can be added at any time to provide more capacity for
guest VMs.

CloudStack automatically detects the amount of CPU and memory resources
provided by the hosts.

Hosts are not visible to the end user. An end user cannot determine
which host their guest has been assigned to.

For a host to function in CloudStack, you must do the following:

-  Install hypervisor software on the host

-  Assign an IP address to the host

-  Ensure the host is connected to the CloudStack Management Server.


About Primary Storage
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Primary storage is associated with a cluster, and it stores
virtual disks for all the VMs running on hosts in that cluster.
On KVM and VMware, you can provision primary storage on a per-zone basis.

You can add multiple primary storage servers to a cluster or zone. At
least one is required. It is typically located close to the hosts for
increased performance. CloudStack manages the allocation of guest
virtual disks to particular primary storage devices.

It is useful to set up zone-wide primary storage when you want to avoid
extra data copy operations. With cluster-based primary storage, data in
the primary storage is directly available only to VMs within that
cluster. If a VM in a different cluster needs some of the data, it must
be copied from one cluster to another, using the zone's secondary
storage as an intermediate step. This operation can be unnecessarily
time-consuming.

For Hyper-V, SMB/CIFS storage is supported. Note that Zone-wide Primary
Storage is not supported in Hyper-V.

Ceph/RBD storage is only supported by the KVM hypervisor. It can be used
as Zone-wide Primary Storage.

CloudStack is designed to work with all standards-compliant iSCSI and
NFS servers that are supported by the underlying hypervisor, including,
for example:

-  SolidFire for iSCSI

-  Dell EqualLogic™ for iSCSI

-  Network Appliances filers for NFS and iSCSI

-  Scale Computing for NFS

If you intend to use only local disk for your installation, you can skip
adding separate primary storage.


About Secondary Storage
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Secondary storage stores the following:

-  Templates — OS images that can be used to boot VMs and can include
   additional configuration information, such as installed applications

-  ISO images — disc images containing data or bootable media for
   operating systems

-  Disk volume snapshots — saved copies of VM data which can be used for
   data recovery or to create new templates

The items in secondary storage are available to all hosts in the scope
of the secondary storage, which may be defined as per zone or per
region.

To make items in secondary storage available to all hosts throughout the
cloud, you can add object storage in addition to the zone-based NFS
Secondary Staging Store. It is not necessary to copy templates and
snapshots from one zone to another, as would be required when using zone
NFS alone. Everything is available everywhere.

For Hyper-V hosts, SMB/CIFS storage is supported.

CloudStack provides plugins that enable both OpenStack Object Storage
(Swift, `swift.openstack.org <http://swift.openstack.org>`__) and Amazon
Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage. When using one of these
storage plugins, you configure Swift or S3 storage for the entire
CloudStack, then set up the NFS Secondary Staging Store for each zone.
The NFS storage in each zone acts as a staging area through which all
templates and other secondary storage data pass before being forwarded
to Swift or S3. The backing object storage acts as a cloud-wide
resource, making templates and other data available to any zone in the
cloud.

.. warning::
   Heterogeneous Secondary Storage is not supported in Regions. For example, 
   you cannot set up multiple zones, one using NFS secondary and the other 
   using S3 or Swift secondary.


About Physical Networks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part of adding a zone is setting up the physical network. One or (in an
advanced zone) more physical networks can be associated with each zone.
The network corresponds to a NIC on the hypervisor host. Each physical
network can carry one or more types of network traffic. The choices of
traffic type for each network vary depending on whether you are creating
a zone with basic networking or advanced networking.

A physical network is the actual network hardware and wiring in a zone.
A zone can have multiple physical networks. An administrator can:

-  Add/Remove/Update physical networks in a zone

-  Configure VLANs on the physical network

-  Configure a name so the network can be recognized by hypervisors

-  Configure the service providers (firewalls, load balancers, etc.)
   available on a physical network

-  Configure the IP addresses trunked to a physical network

-  Specify what type of traffic is carried on the physical network, as
   well as other properties like network speed


Basic Zone Network Traffic Types
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When basic networking is used, there can be only one physical network in
the zone. That physical network carries the following traffic types:

-  Guest. When end users run VMs, they generate guest traffic. The guest
   VMs communicate with each other over a network that can be referred
   to as the guest network. Each pod in a basic zone is a broadcast
   domain, and therefore each pod has a different IP range for the guest
   network. The administrator must configure the IP range for each pod.

-  Management. When CloudStack's internal resources communicate with
   each other, they generate management traffic. This includes
   communication between hosts, system VMs (VMs used by CloudStack to
   perform various tasks in the cloud), and any other component that
   communicates directly with the CloudStack Management Server. You must
   configure the IP range for the system VMs to use.

.. note::
   We strongly recommend the use of separate NICs for management traffic
   and guest traffic.

-  Public. Public traffic is generated when VMs in the cloud access the
   Internet. Publicly accessible IPs must be allocated for this purpose.
   End users can use the CloudStack UI to acquire these IPs to implement
   NAT between their guest network and the public network, as described
   in Acquiring a New IP Address.

-  Storage. While labeled "storage" this is specifically about secondary
   storage, and doesn't affect traffic for primary storage. This
   includes traffic such as VM templates and snapshots, which is sent
   between the secondary storage VM and secondary storage servers.
   CloudStack uses a separate Network Interface Controller (NIC) named
   storage NIC for storage network traffic. Use of a storage NIC that
   always operates on a high bandwidth network allows fast template and
   snapshot copying. You must configure the IP range to use for the
   storage network.

In a basic network, configuring the physical network is fairly
straightforward. In most cases, you only need to configure one guest
network to carry traffic that is generated by guest VMs. If you use a
NetScaler load balancer and enable its elastic IP and elastic load
balancing (EIP and ELB) features, you must also configure a network to
carry public traffic. CloudStack takes care of presenting the necessary
network configuration steps to you in the UI when you add a new zone.


Basic Zone Guest IP Addresses
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When basic networking is used, CloudStack will assign IP addresses in
the CIDR of the pod to the guests in that pod. The administrator must
add a Direct IP range on the pod for this purpose. These IPs are in the
same VLAN as the hosts.

.. _about-adv-network-traffic-types:

Advanced Zone Network Traffic Types
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When advanced networking is used, there can be multiple physical
networks in the zone. Each physical network can carry one or more
traffic types, and you need to let CloudStack know which type of network
traffic you want each network to carry. The traffic types in an advanced
zone are:

-  Guest. When end users run VMs, they generate guest traffic. The guest
   VMs communicate with each other over a network that can be referred
   to as the guest network. This network can be isolated or shared. In
   an isolated guest network, the administrator needs to reserve VLAN
   ranges to provide isolation for each CloudStack account’s network
   (potentially a large number of VLANs). In a shared guest network, all
   guest VMs share a single network.

-  Management. When CloudStack’s internal resources communicate with
   each other, they generate management traffic. This includes
   communication between hosts, system VMs (VMs used by CloudStack to
   perform various tasks in the cloud), and any other component that
   communicates directly with the CloudStack Management Server. You must
   configure the IP range for the system VMs to use.

-  Public. Public traffic is generated when VMs in the cloud access the
   Internet. Publicly accessible IPs must be allocated for this purpose.
   End users can use the CloudStack UI to acquire these IPs to implement
   NAT between their guest network and the public network, as described
   in “Acquiring a New IP Address” in the Administration Guide.

-  Storage. While labeled "storage" this is specifically about secondary
   storage, and doesn't affect traffic for primary storage. This
   includes traffic such as VM templates and snapshots, which is sent
   between the secondary storage VM and secondary storage servers.
   CloudStack uses a separate Network Interface Controller (NIC) named
   storage NIC for storage network traffic. Use of a storage NIC that
   always operates on a high bandwidth network allows fast template and
   snapshot copying. You must configure the IP range to use for the
   storage network.

These traffic types can each be on a separate physical network, or they
can be combined with certain restrictions. When you use the Add Zone
wizard in the UI to create a new zone, you are guided into making only
valid choices.


Advanced Zone Guest IP Addresses
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When advanced networking is used, the administrator can create
additional networks for use by the guests. These networks can span the
zone and be available to all accounts, or they can be scoped to a single
account, in which case only the named account may create guests that
attach to these networks. The networks are defined by a VLAN ID, IP
range, and gateway. The administrator may provision thousands of these
networks if desired. Additionally, the administrator can reserve a part
of the IP address space for non-CloudStack VMs and servers.


Advanced Zone Public IP Addresses
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When advanced networking is used, the administrator can create
additional networks for use by the guests. These networks can span the
zone and be available to all accounts, or they can be scoped to a single
account, in which case only the named account may create guests that
attach to these networks. The networks are defined by a VLAN ID, IP
range, and gateway. The administrator may provision thousands of these
networks if desired.

.. _about_system_reserved_ip_addresses:

System Reserved IP Addresses
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In each zone, you need to configure a range of reserved IP addresses for
the management network. This network carries communication between the
CloudStack Management Server and various system VMs, such as Secondary
Storage VMs, Console Proxy VMs, and DHCP.

The reserved IP addresses must be unique across the cloud. You cannot,
for example, have a host in one zone which has the same private IP
address as a host in another zone.

The hosts in a pod are assigned private IP addresses. These are
typically RFC1918 addresses. The Console Proxy and Secondary Storage
system VMs are also allocated private IP addresses in the CIDR of the
pod that they are created in.

Make sure computing servers and Management Servers use IP addresses
outside of the System Reserved IP range. For example, suppose the System
Reserved IP range starts at 192.168.154.2 and ends at 192.168.154.7.
CloudStack can use .2 to .7 for System VMs. This leaves the rest of the
pod CIDR, from .8 to .254, for the Management Server and hypervisor
hosts.

**In all zones:**

Provide private IPs for the system in each pod and provision them in
CloudStack.

For KVM and XenServer, the recommended number of private IPs per pod is
one per host. If you expect a pod to grow, add enough private IPs now to
accommodate the growth.

**In a zone that uses advanced networking:**

For zones with advanced networking, we recommend provisioning enough
private IPs for your total number of customers, plus enough for the
required CloudStack System VMs. Typically, about 10 additional IPs are
required for the System VMs. For more information about System VMs, see
the section on working with SystemVMs in the Administrator's Guide.

When advanced networking is being used, the number of private IP
addresses available in each pod varies depending on which hypervisor is
running on the nodes in that pod. Citrix XenServer and KVM use
link-local addresses, which in theory provide more than 65,000 private
IP addresses within the address block. As the pod grows over time, this
should be more than enough for any reasonable number of hosts as well as
IP addresses for guest virtual routers. VMWare ESXi, by contrast uses
any administrator-specified subnetting scheme, and the typical
administrator provides only 255 IPs per pod. Since these are shared by
physical machines, the guest virtual router, and other entities, it is
possible to run out of private IPs when scaling up a pod whose nodes are
running ESXi.

To ensure adequate headroom to scale private IP space in an ESXi pod
that uses advanced networking, use one or both of the following
techniques:

-  Specify a larger CIDR block for the subnet. A subnet mask with a /20
   suffix will provide more than 4,000 IP addresses.

-  Create multiple pods, each with its own subnet. For example, if you
   create 10 pods and each pod has 255 IPs, this will provide 2,550 IP
   addresses.