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Exploring Apache CloudStack
Stack Check
Apache CloudStack [1] is an open source software platform that pools computing resources to build public, private, and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The CloudStack toolset manages the network, storage, and compute nodes that make up a Cloud infrastructure.
CloudStack started life as VMOps, a company founded in 2008 with product development spearheaded by Sheng Liang, who developed the Java Virtual Machine at Sun. Although early versions were very much focused on the Xen Hypervisor, the team soon realized the benefits of multi-hypervisor support. In early 2010, the company achieved a massive marketing win when it acquired the domain name http://cloud.com and formally launched CloudStack, which was 98 percent open source. In July 2011, CloudStack was acquired by Citrix Systems [2], who released the remaining code as open source under GPLv3.
The big news came in April 2012, when Citrix donated CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation, where is was accepted into the Apache Incubator. Apache CloudStack has now been promoted to a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation, a measure of the maturity of the code and its community. Citrix continues to market the cloud management solution CloudPlatform [3], which is built on CloudStack.
Multiple Hypervisor Support
CloudStack works with a variety of hypervisors, and a single cloud deployment can contain multiple hypervisor implementations. The current release of CloudStack supports pre-packaged enterprise solutions like Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as OVM and KVM or Xen running on Ubuntu or CentOS. Support for Hyper-V is currently in development and should be available in a future
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