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 use this solution for two things; the first is the handling of all of our virtual machines through centralization, and the second is the orchestration of services.

This is one of the major products that help to handle all of the NFV Infrastructure management services (IaaS). It has helped us to quickly gain understanding and feel more powerful with respect to virtualization.

The three features that I find most valuable are:

• It is user-friendly.
• It is scalable.
• The ease of API use. When you compare it with OpenStack, CloudStack is something that you can deploy faster on because you have fewer components and more services. You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules.

One area that needs improvement is the stability. It is stable, but there are issues. It is related to the lack of support for an open source product. It comes down to needing more active people in the product's open source user community.

There are release notes with the product, but I would like to see more documentation. For example, it would be nice to have instructions on how to integrate with DPDK (Data plane developer kit) because it would make it much easier.

I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance.

The stability is problematic, in part, because there is no support. It is an open source product, so similar to OpenStack there is community involvement. One challenge, however, is that it is a small community of users compared to OpenStack. There are professional services available by multiple vendors, so you can leverage that if you wish to.

It becomes an issue when there are new problems and you do not have support for them to be fixed. Otherwise, the product is good. If it is working fine then it will continue to work until something changes.

If you are stuck with a problem then it may take between a couple of days and a couple of months to solve it. It may require research, but it is challenging because you do not have a major community of people.

I would say that the product scalability is good. It is very scalable, but it requires some additional effort from the user's side, or the administrator's side, to understand the product well before making changes to the environment. Research has to be done, and a POC may be required.

For example, it is possible to integrate this solution with Ceph Storage or load balancers, and it will handle it, but you have to do some research first. Similarly, if you want to integrate it with a public DNS or an internal DNS, you will have to test it well before integrating it.

We currently have fifteen users, but it is a system administration tool so there is not much customer-centric traffic. This is actually one of the major benefits that you have. Even with fifteen people, doing the same thing or otherwise, it allows you to have your own space without overriding the other person. It allows you to be multi-tenant.

They have zone features that allow you to keep your local environment, so if you want to deploy multiple cloud stacks, you do not need to. You can keep just one cloud stack and integrate with all of the servers at once. This is in contrast to OpenStack, where you have to deploy one OpenStack per region or per area so that all of your computers can be centrally managed.

Our usage will increase as we add more servers, or expand our services.

There is no technical support available because it is an open source, community-based product. However, certain people can still provide you with technical support. This technical assistance is a paid service, separate from the community itself. It is a group of experts and I would say that they are good enough. If you don't feel comfortable using the product, or there are stability issues that you frequently see, you can buy professional services.

This product has been in use since I joined the company.

It is simple to perform the initial setup. Compared to OpenStack, it is really straightforward and simple. The deployment will take a couple of hours.

You will need at least two or three people to maintain the solution. It is a complex environment, even though it has a very simple GUI. The back-end system, such as the database or the application itself, definitely requires at least four to five good people who are able to handle issues in the CloudStack environment.

This is less maintenance than is required for other solutions, but expertise is still needed.

We handled the implementation in-house.

The ROI is there. While there is no cost to the product, there is an infrastructure cost. ROI is realized in time savings, and in community-based products, the major investment is your time. 

If you integrate with other products you can do fault tolerance, too.

The bottom line is that the ROI is there provided you invest your time in it. If you do then you will be well paid for it, because the product will help you to easily grow your environment, and make it scale faster.

There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services. You need to pay for your infrastructure and hosting charges, but those are the only fees that you are required to bear.

We are presently evaluating OpenStack.

CloudStack is faster than OpenStack. The OpenStack solution takes years and years to build your services, whereas CloudStack allows for much faster deployment.

I do not think that we are switching to OpenStack because it is a more complex product.

Another option would be Kubernetes with Mirantis or any other product suite, but we have not evaluated this.

My advice for anybody interested in implementing this product is to do the POC, and don't just go blindly with it. You need to see what the pitfalls are and whether your team can handle it, or not. If they cannot handle it then you should look at other cloud products, such as those that have more support in the community. 

On the other hand, if you are looking for something small, scalable, and easy to deploy, then this is a good solution.

I would rate this product a seven and a half out of ten.

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.

CloudStack is an open-source platform for deploying infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Our company uses it to offer IaaS to companies who want to have public, private, or hybrid cloud.

I implemented this platform in two companies in Colombia. It was used to offer our customers a portal where they could create servers easily, safely, and have stable performance. I worked with different hypervisors and installed CloudStack in different operating systems. The integration is excellent. We had three zones in the platform for specific countries, approximately four pods and 10 clusters with VMware and XenServer hosts, and more than 500 virtual machines in production.

Customers were very happy with how easy it is to create a VPN site-to-site or a NAT, deploy a new virtual machine from a template, take a Snapshot, or clone a VM.

• CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure.
• It is very easy to install and manage.
• It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack).
• The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows.

The product has evolved a lot since the first versions in which it was very complicated to do version updates, and had various problems.

No problem, the platform is very stable.

The platform has some problems, but this is due to restrictions of the hypervisor. For example, it's not possible to augment the disk core in VMware or reduce vCPU with the VM running.

We had support with Citrix and Shapeblue. Currently we only use the CloudStack community.

The initial setup was easy with the support of a partner.

I recommend that you initially consider what solution or cloud product you require. Then, if you are looking for a stable product that is easy to install with a lot of documentation, a portal that is very easy to understand and manage and that can be modified, you should use CloudStack.

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.

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.

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.