Dear list, we do use CloudStack in production to provide VPCs and root server to our customers. Recently we started using our CloudStack environment to implement new managed hosting projects. For managed hosting we usually do monitoring/alarming, backup and 24x7 support. Most of our managed hosting have been done bare metal or VMWare based. Implementing this latest managed hosting project, which consists of about 16 systems on CloudStack felt somehow "wrong". We had to use the VPCs private GW to get access to all VMs (monitoring, 24x7 support). As no PVLAN is supported here we had to use a separated VLAN (we will have to do so for each managed hosting customer). The VPCs firewall GUI does not allow any comments and is very basic. This does not allow us to track changes and document rules. Certain tasks have to be done while logged in as the customers CloudStack user otherwise the user would not be able to, eg. mount extra disks. The idea was to use CloudStack snapshots to do backups but I don't think snapshots are like real backups (you don't know if there are any filesystem errors) and all the scheduling and reporting about snapshots failing or being successful is very basic.
Overall I was asking myself if there is any benefit of using Cloudstack over Xenserver (our cloudstack hypervisor) to do managed hosting? It felt more like forcing something to do a job it wasn't build for... What do you think? All the best, Florian
