What’s New in 4.15.0.0

Apache CloudStack 4.15.0.0 is a 4.15 LTS release with over 15 major new features, and over 250 enhancements and fixes since 4.14. Highlights include:

  • New modern UI (GA release)
  • Support for CentOS8 and Ubuntu 20.04 for management server and KVM hosts (note: CentOS 8 will EOL in Dec 2021)
  • Support for XCP-ng 8.1
  • Support for MySQL 8
  • NoVNC console integration
  • Unmanaging guest VMs
  • VMware advanced storage capabilities (vSAN, vVols, VMFS6, datastore clusters)
  • VMware full OVF properties support
  • Secondary Storage usage improvements
  • PVLAN support for L2 networks
  • Role-based users in Projects
  • Dynamic roles improvements
  • Boot into BIOS on VMware
  • Redfish OOBM Support
  • Human readable sizes in logs

The full list of new features can be found in the project release notes at http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/4.15.0.0/releasenotes/changes.html

Important

This version of CloudStack allows control over the visibility of the DNS services provided by the Virtual Router in Shared networks. By default CloudStack allows DNS queries via the Guest interface from any IP address. This allows for the DNS resolution of guest VMs on the Shared network by services outside of the shared network. While this can be useful, it can also be an issue on Shared Networks which are using Internet routable/public (i.e. non-RFC1918) IP addresses, as the DNS service is then queriable from the public internet at large. A new global setting “expose.dns.externally” has been added (with a default value of “true” in order to keep backward compatibility) which controls whether the source of DNS queries should be limited to only hosts on the Shared Network guest subnet or not. If you wish to disable ‘outside’ access to the DNS services running on Virtual Routers; set the value to “false” and recreate the related Virtual Routers.

Apache CloudStack powers numerous elastic Cloud computing services, including solutions that have ranked as Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders. Highlighted in the Forrester Q4 2017 Enterprise Open Source Cloud Adoption report, Apache CloudStack “sits beneath hundreds of service provider clouds”, including Fortune 5 multinational corporations. A list of known Apache CloudStack users are available at http://cloudstack.apache.org/users.html

Libvirt Python Dependency on KVM and CentOS

For CentOS users using the security groups feature on KVM it is needed to install the epel-release and python36-libvirt packages.

Workaround for adding newer KVM hosts

Newer GNU/Linux distributions with latest OpenSSH package disables some older SSH algorithms and ciphers and newer algorithms are not supported by trilead-ssh library used by CloudStack to SSH into KVM hosts during the host-add operation. Until the dependency library can support that users can use the following workaround in their KVM host’s /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart ssh server before adding the KVM host in CloudStack:

PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss

HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss

KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

New UI GA and Legacy UI Deprecation and Removal Notice

Cloudstack 4.15 ships with the GA release of a new and modern User Interface as the default UI which deprecates the current legacy UI. With version 4.15, the existing legacy UI (deprecated) along with the new UI are the supported UI for production environments.

The default URL <host>:8080/client will serve the new UI and <host>:8080/client/legacy will serve the deprecated legacy UI.

In the next release (4.16), the Apache Cloudstack community will remove the legacy UI. Users are encouraged to implement a migration path towards deprecating the legacy UI in their production environments.