#cloud

Inspiration

Most of the enterprises are moving to cloud. The biggest issue while moving to cloud is migrating existing datacenter to cloud. 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. The regular way to onboard a datacenter to CloudStack is very tedious.

• Shutting down vms
• Export root disks to a webserver
• Register them as templates in a cloud
• Deploy new VMs using these templates

We aimed to solve this problem by on-boarding an existing datacenter to Apache CloudStack running cloud with no downtime.

How it works

• New API call to import datacenter by passing datacenter ipAddress and credentials
• Scan hosts in that pool and read all the required information for that pool.
• Lists all RUNNING and STOPPED VMs in data-center.
• Go through the fetch virtual machine list and read VM details information
• Once CloudStack has all the information to manage the data-center, put the details in CloudStack database.
• Now, cloudstack contains all the reqd. information in DB and admin has successfully imported the data-center.

Challenges I ran into

• Import VMs with data-disks
• Importing VMs with isolated network.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Solved real life cloud problem with simple hack.

What I learned

• While working on the project we came across many unknowns which we didn't think of when we started the project. Finding the answers to those questions is our next to do thing.

What's next for #cloud

• Extend support for other hypervisors.
• Extend support for advance networking model.