StorPool Improves Support for VMware Alternative Apache CloudStack

StorPool Storage extended the capabilities of its Apache CloudStack integration in light of skyrocketing demand from VMware customers.

Apache CloudStack is an open-source cloud computing software platform designed to deploy and manage large arrays of VMs as a highly available, highly scalable IaaS. It is becoming increasingly popular with VMware customers looking to reduce vendor lock-in, optimize the cost of their IT environments, and future-proof their businesses.

CloudStack’s current KVM-hypervisor host HA feature depends on having an NFS primary storage to detect which nodes are online, even if other types of primary storage are used, such as faster block-level storage. The company extends the HA feature by adding a mechanism that overcomes the NFS primary storage heartbeat dependency to extend KVM host high availability for non-NFS storage in CloudStack environments.

This implementation supports using StorPool Storage for HA heartbeats, removing the need for NFS primary storage, simplifying CloudStack deployments, and ensuring that host HA relies on the storage where VM data is stored. Now, cloud builders WW in various forms and shapes – managed service providers, cloud and hosting providers, cloud services providers, SaaS vendors, and even enterprises – who want to design a cloud with CloudStack can have a block-level primary storage, instead of the NFS-only alternative.

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This latest functionality allows cloud and storage architects to deploy a highly automated cloud that delivers reliable, agile, fast, easy-to-manage, and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure based on CloudStack working with KVM hosts and StorPool Storage. Future enhancements will support KVM host HA for HCI deployments with CloudStack compute and StorPool storage running concurrently on the same servers.

“While KVM and CloudStack are being rapidly adopted, especially after the Broadcom-VMware deal, this stack has been limited in storage options when looking to leverage high availability deployments,” said Alex Ivanov, product lead. “StorPool has developed a way to bypass the heartbeat protocol that locks people into NFS primary storage. By making changes on the agent side where the heartbeat happens instead of the HA framework itself, we have been able to overcome the need to use NFS primary storage as a mandatory component of the cloud and instead deliver above and beyond what is possible with other primary storage products in terms of reliability, agility, speed, and cost-effectiveness.”

Resources:
StorPool Storage powering Apache CloudStack Environments
The CloudStack and StorPool technical brief
Blog: Unleashing High-Performance: The Power of Block Storage in Modern Applications