CloudBolt Blog

Customers are speaking, and we’re listening. C2 v4.1 contains a host of customer-suggested enhancements that are designed to enhance the capability and usability of C2’s management of a wide variety of IT resources.

Virtual Private Clouds and Amazon Web Services

In C2 4.1, the AWS connector now has the ability to detect, manage, and deploy systems into VPCs. C2 Environments backended by the AWS connector will now discover VPCs, VPC subnets, and other VPC-specific options such as security groups. C2 will also now auto-create C2 Environments for each selected VPC/Region, which nearly eliminates additional setup and configurations required.

VMware Integration Improvements

As we showed with our latest AWS updates, we’re always on the lookout for additional features to add to existing connectors. In this release, we’ve improved our VMware integration by adding more in-depth automatic C2 Environment creation for each VMware-hosted cluster present in vCenter. C2 will also now auto-discover any resource pool or datastore options as configured in vCenter, and will automatically create and map those options to C2 fields.

Re-Importing and Updating

Once AWS and VMware environments are created, C2 can now auto-detect and re-import changes to the underlying configuration of those environments. This includes things like VMware datastores, resource pools, and AWS security groups.

The Docs

We now include the full CloudBolt C2 product documentation as part of the install. The bottom of every page contains a link to access the embedded product documentation.

Speeds and Feeds

Despite our class-leading interface—recognized as the most intuitive available in a Cloud Manager, we’re always working to improve the user experience and keep it at the top. In C2 4.1, we’ve worked to get the rust out of many parts of the interface—so it will be faster than ever—especially on the server list page for environments that have thousands of servers. We’ve also polished the interface in several areas to help with usability. 

Additional Improvements

We already talk to Puppet Configuration Management, and now we speak that language even better with a updated Puppet connector in C2 4.1. 

We’re the only Cloud manager that can use itself to test your critical provisioning workflows. Configuring the Cloud Supply Chain Validator (CSCV) capability in C2 4.1 is now fully managed in the C2 UI, rather than requiring a configuration file modification.

For Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M), C2 will now automatically import the RHEV-M API certificate.

Our engineering team continues to incorporate significant capability into the C2 platform. Version 3.7.2 includes several updates intended to improve the end-user experience as well as admin-specific features which further C2’s benefit to IT administrators. Despite the added features, we continue to innovate with an eye toward intuitive interfaces and controls. In C2’s case, added benefit does not equal added complexity.

On to the improvements!  First, the big one: C2 now ships and supports an OVA template that enables IT administrators to rapidly deploy C2 in XenServer. We’ve offered this capability on VMware’s vCenter since the beginning, but now C2 offers the same time-to-value for those that have selected a different virtualization manager. 

In larger deployments, the administrator view of the C2 Job List can be quite long. To help with this, we’ve added both a better UI to view job statistics, but also the ability to filter the job list based on job type.

Sticking with this theme, we also made significant improvements to the page C2 Administrators use to control Server Build Defaults. Administrators now have an easier interaction to add new, or change existing default settings for the parameters required by the underlying virtualization manager.

C2 Administrators have long had the ability to set resource group quotas in C2. In this latest release, we’ve made point improvements to how this system operates behind-the-scenes. The result is a more robust quota framework that ensures C2 Administrators are continually able to rely on C2 to effectively enforce resource limits set on the group level.

Several customers have asked that C2 provide them the ability to automatically test the network connection for a provisioned server. We were happy to oblige. C2 can now ping the server’s IP to ensure the network was set up correctly before completing the provisioning job.

Lastly, on the C2 Administrator side, we’ve made some back-end Apache configuration tweaks and changes to further improve the UI performance.

Of course, we didn’t forget about you IT consumers out there!  C2 Administrators have been able to modify the ordering process to match the end user’s level of ability and understanding. In version 3.7.2, C2 Administrators are now able to add tool tips that will be displayed in the ordering process. These tool tips give C2 Administrators a way to explain required inputs to end users in a clear and concise manner. In this case, as always, the C2 interface is modified from within the C2 interface. No need for costly developers, or SDK licenses.

Happy provisioning with the well-oiled machine that is CloudBolt Command and Control!