The Apache Software Foundation which took over the developement of CloudStack platform from Citrix in April 2012 today released version 4.3 of Apache CloudStack. Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.
With this release CloudStack now supports the most popular hypervisors from: VMware, KVM, XenServer, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Cloudstack can be managed using a Web interface, command line tools, and/or a full-featured RESTful API. In addition, CloudStack provides an API that’s compatible with AWS EC2 and S3 for organizations that wish to deploy hybrid clouds.
Version 4.3 adds the following new features, as detailed in the release notes:
- Support for Microsoft Hyper-V – Apache CloudStack can now manage Hyper-V hypervisors in addition to KVM, XenServer, VMware, LXC, and Bare Metal
- Juniper OpenContrail integration – OpenContrail is a software defined networking controller from Juniper that CloudStack now integrates with to provide SDN services
- SSL Termination support for guest VMs – Apache CloudStack can configure and manage SSL termination in certain load balancer devices
- Palo Alto Firewall integration – Apache CloudStack can now manage and configure Palo Alto firewalls
- Remote access VPN for VPC networks – CloudStack’s remote access VPN is now available for Virtual Private Cloud networks
- Site to Site VPN between VRs – CloudStack now allows site-to-site VPN connectivity to it’s virtual routing devices. This permits your cloud computing environment to appear as a natural extension of your local network, or for you to easily interconnect multiple environments
- VXLAN support expansion to include KVM – CloudStack’s support for integrating VXLAN, the network virtualization technology that attempts to ameliorate scalability problems with traditional networking
- SolidFire plugin extension to support KVM and hypervisor snapshots for XenServer and ESX – SolidFire provides guaranteed Storage Quality of Service at the Virtual Machine level
- Dynamic Compute offering – CloudStack now has the ability to dynamically scale the resources assigned to a running virtual machine instance for those hypervisors which support it