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Cloud features

Cloud features refer to the capability of delegating resources outside the platform administrators perimeters, like developers or customers.

You have multiple choices:

  1. Using Xen Orchestra Cloud features (ACLs, Self Service)
  2. Using CloudStack or OpenStack (adapted to very large deployments)

🛰️ Xen Orchestra​

Some interesting "cloud-like" features are available in Xen Orchestra : ACLs and Self-service.

Cloud-init​

Cloud-init is a program "that handles the early initialization of a cloud instance". In other words, you can, on a "cloud-init"-ready template VM, pass a lot of data at first boot:

  • setting the hostname
  • add ssh keys
  • automatically grow the file system
  • create users
  • and a lot more!

This tool is pretty standard and used everywhere. A lot of existing cloud templates are using it.

So it means very easily customizing your VM when you create it from a compatible template. It brings you closer to the "instance" principle, like in Amazon cloud or OpenStack.

ACLs​

ACLs can be used to allow some XO users to only see some resources. See more about ACLs on the official documentation.

Self-service​

The self-service feature allows users to create new VMs within a limited amount of resources (quotas). This is different from delegating existing resources (VMs) to them, and it leads to a lot of possibilities. Read XO official doc on it to know more.

☁️ 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. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, or as part of a hybrid cloud solution.

XCP-ng is a certified and compatible platform for CloudStack.

See the dedicated documentation on how to install CloudStack on top of XCP-ng.

📚 OpenStack​

warning

Unlike Cloudstack, we do not know the level of compatibility with OpenStack. Take time to ask OpenStack community about their support for XAPI-based hosts

Documentation can be found on this page.