VirtualBox: The CloudStack Development Environment

Hot off the mailing lists, there is a new disk image, designed to be run in VirtualBox, that provides a complete working Apache CloudStack (incubating) instance, along with a in-house hypervisor. Edison Su, one of the CloudStack developers, built this Ubuntu-based image to make things pretty simple to stand up a development environment.

Historically, the problem with developing for CloudStack was that it was easy to stand up the management server pieces on your local machine for testing, but you still needed a hypervisor (and potentially a network). You could condense all of that down and make it a single machine with KVM, but it's still likely going to be a different machine than your personal desktop/laptop simply due to the invasiveness of the networking changes necessary for doing so.

This also has a added bonus of giving people a relatively completely setup environment to work with, with precious little extra effort.

But given my traditional blog audience, I know there will be several questions:

Why an Ubuntu-based image? Primarily because Ubuntu has Xen+XAPI (aka Kronos) support, which is effectively a XCP or XenServer in CloudStack's eyes. While Fedora has Xen support it doesn't yet have all of the XAPI bits (it's something else that's on my terribly long todo list)

Why Xen+XAPI instead of KVM? So Xen (regardless of XAPI) can provide para-virtualization in addition to hardware virtualization, while KVM is hardware virtualization only. While some hypervisors (KVM included) can perform nested hardware virtualization, PV still tends to be a bit more performant.

And an obligatory disclaimer - this obviously isn't an official release of any kind, just an additional tool to help people hack on Apache CloudStack (incubating).

Get the image at:

http://download.cloud.com/templates/devcloud/DevCloud.ova

Read the documentation at:

http://wiki.cloudstack.org/display/comm/DevCloud

This blog post originally appeared at:
http://ke4qqq.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/virtualized-cloudstack-development-environment/