Installation overview

Introduction

Who Should Read This

For those who have already gone through a design phase and planned a more sophisticated deployment, or those who are ready to start scaling up a trial installation. With the following procedures, you can start using the more powerful features of CloudStack, such as advanced VLAN networking, high availability, additional network elements such as load balancers and firewalls, and support for multiple hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, KVM, and VMware vSphere.

Installation Steps

For anything more than a simple trial installation, you will need guidance for a variety of configuration choices. It is strongly recommended that you read the following:

  • Choosing a Deployment Architecture
  • Choosing a Hypervisor: Supported Features
  • Network Setup
  • Storage Setup
  • Best Practices
  1. Make sure you have the required hardware ready. See Minimum System Requirements
  2. Install the Management Server (choose single-node or multi-node). See Management Server Installation
  3. Configure your cloud. See Configuring your CloudStack Installation
    1. Using CloudStack UI. See *User Interface* :ref:`log-in-to-ui
    2. Add a zone. Includes the first pod, cluster, and host. See Adding a Zone
    3. Add more pods (optional). See Adding a Pod
    4. Add more clusters (optional). See Adding a Cluster
    5. Add more hosts (optional). See Adding a Host
    6. Add more primary storage (optional). See Add Primary Storage
    7. Add more secondary storage (optional). See Add Secondary Storage
  4. Try using the cloud. See Initialize and Test

Minimum System Requirements

Management Server, Database, and Storage System Requirements

The machines that will run the Management Server and MySQL database must meet the following requirements. The same machines can also be used to provide primary and secondary storage, such as via localdisk or NFS. The Management Server may be placed on a virtual machine.

  • Operating system:
    • Preferred: CentOS/RHEL 7.2+, CentOS/RHEL 6.8+ or Ubuntu 14.04(.2) or higher
  • 64-bit x86 CPU (more cores results in better performance)
  • 4 GB of memory
  • 250 GB of local disk (more results in better capability; 500 GB recommended)
  • At least 1 NIC
  • Statically allocated IP address
  • Fully qualified domain name as returned by the hostname command

Host/Hypervisor System Requirements

The host is where the cloud services run in the form of guest virtual machines. Each host is one machine that meets the following requirements:

  • Must support HVM (Intel-VT or AMD-V enabled).
  • 64-bit x86 CPU (more cores results in better performance)
  • Hardware virtualization support required
  • 4 GB of memory
  • 36 GB of local disk
  • At least 1 NIC
  • Latest hotfixes applied to hypervisor software
  • When you deploy CloudStack, the hypervisor host must not have any VMs already running
  • All hosts within a cluster must be homogeneous. The CPUs must be of the same type, count, and feature flags.

Hosts have additional requirements depending on the hypervisor. See the requirements listed at the top of the Installation section for your chosen hypervisor:

Warning

Be sure you fulfill the additional hypervisor requirements and installation steps provided in this Guide. Hypervisor hosts must be properly prepared to work with CloudStack. For example, the requirements for XenServer are listed under Citrix XenServer Installation.

Package Repository

CloudStack is only distributed from source from the official Apache mirrors. However, members of the CloudStack community may build convenience binaries so that users can install Apache CloudStack without needing to build from source.

If you didn’t follow the steps to build your own packages from source in the sections for “Building RPMs from Source” or “Building DEB packages” you may find pre-built DEB and RPM packages for your convenience linked from the downloads page.

Note

These repositories contain both the Management Server and KVM Hypervisor packages.