Managed hosting and Cloudstack

[Engelmann Florian <fl...@everyware.ch>]

Dear list,

we do use CloudStack in production to provide VPCs and root server to our customers. Recently we started using our CloudStack environment to implement new managed hosting projects. For managed hosting we usually do monitoring/alarming, backup and 24x7 support. Most of our managed hosting have been done bare metal or VMWare based. Implementing this latest managed hosting project, which consists of about 16 systems on CloudStack felt somehow "wrong". We had to use the VPCs private GW to get access to all VMs (monitoring, 24x7 support). As no PVLAN is supported here we had to use a separated VLAN (we will have to do so for each managed hosting customer). The VPCs firewall GUI does not allow any comments and is very basic. This does not allow us to track changes and document rules. Certain tasks have to be done while logged in as the customers CloudStack user otherwise the user would not be able to, eg. mount extra disks. The idea was to use CloudStack snapshots to do backups but I don't think snapshots are like real backups (you don't know if there are any filesystem errors) and all the scheduling and reporting about snapshots failing or being successful is very basic.

Overall I was asking myself if there is any benefit of using Cloudstack over Xenserver (our cloudstack hypervisor) to do managed hosting? It felt more like forcing something to do a job it wasn't build for... What do you think?

All the best,
Florian

Re: Managed hosting and Cloudstack

[Nux! <nu...@li.nux.ro>]

Hello,

IMHO it does look like using ACS VPC might not be the best choice for  you.
I would rather look at an Advanced Zone with Security Groups and public IPs instead, if you are happy to only have 1 network per VM or at Shared Networks.

Snapshots indeed are not the best way to do backups, I would advise using something specialised such as Bacula or R1soft, inside the VMs.

I would still use ACS over XenCenter, mainly because it does add some nice things, such as userdata, API and a certain hypervisor agnosticism, should you ever want to move away from XS.

HTH

Lucian

--
Sent from the Delta quadrant using Borg technology!

Nux!
www.nux.ro

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Engelmann Florian" <fl...@everyware.ch>
> To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
> Sent: Monday, 14 March, 2016 12:41:38
> Subject: Managed hosting and Cloudstack

> Dear list,
> 
> we do use CloudStack in production to provide VPCs and root server to our
> customers. Recently we started using our CloudStack environment to implement
> new managed hosting projects. For managed hosting we usually do
> monitoring/alarming, backup and 24x7 support. Most of our managed hosting have
> been done bare metal or VMWare based. Implementing this latest managed hosting
> project, which consists of about 16 systems on CloudStack felt somehow "wrong".
> We had to use the VPCs private GW to get access to all VMs (monitoring, 24x7
> support). As no PVLAN is supported here we had to use a separated VLAN (we will
> have to do so for each managed hosting customer). The VPCs firewall GUI does
> not allow any comments and is very basic. This does not allow us to track
> changes and document rules. Certain tasks have to be done while logged in as
> the customers CloudStack user otherwise the user would not be able to, eg.
> mount extra disks. The idea was to use CloudStack snapshots to do backups but I
> don't think snapshots are like real backups (you don't know if there are any
> filesystem errors) and all the scheduling and reporting about snapshots failing
> or being successful is very basic.
> 
> Overall I was asking myself if there is any benefit of using Cloudstack over
> Xenserver (our cloudstack hypervisor) to do managed hosting? It felt more like
> forcing something to do a job it wasn't build for... What do you think?
> 
> All the best,
> Florian