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.

The next-generation Cloud Manager keeps innovating in numerous ways that help make IT organizations run better and more efficiently.  

Each time the product team goes to the whiteboard to talk about the C2 roadmap, we rely on our decades of combined data center experience.  We recall the hundreds of conversations we’ve had with current customers.  We want you to know that we’ve listened.  The result is a new major release of CloudBolt C2 that brings connectivity and resiliency of our customers’ Cloud Resources to unparalleled levels.   Some of the key new features in C2 4.0 are: 

Cloud Supply Chain Verification (CSCV)

We’re proud to announce the availability of the CSCV system.  Sounds intimidating, but we’re certain you’ll need it.  As the numbers of IT environments, virtualization platforms, DCA tools, and Orchestration tools increase, so does the overall complexity of running and provisioning systems into any one environment.  C2 does a great job of orchestrating and automating this entire process, but what happens when an administrator changes a password in vCenter?  Or a developer unexpectedly updates a workflow in an external orchestration tool?  Automated provisioning will break. 

The Cloud Supply Chain Validator. Ensure that all aspects of your automated environment are operational.

The purpose of CSCV is to ensure that all needed actions in any environment configured in C2 both executes, and returns the expected result.  CSCV will automatically run through any number of tests, and immediately notify the CloudBolt Administrators in the event of a failure. 

We don’t just allow for CSCV to test provisioning, though.  CSCV can test the end-to-end process of de-commissioning, power on/off, and installing/removing applications.

In short, C2 will tell you when something breaks in the end-to-end provisioning process for any environment C2 is configured to manage.  It does this across virtualization and public/private cloud platforms as well as Data Center Automation tools, Configuration Management tools, and any external Orchestrators (more on that momentarily), and, of course, any orchestration hooks that you have configured in your environment. 

Read more about the CSCV in a blog post here.

Multi-Portal Support

Are you a managed service provider that’s using C2 as a portal for your end users?  With v4.0, we’ve added multi-portal support.  C2 can now be configured to accept connections from multiple URLs.  Your customers or users securely connect to CloudBolt and each URL will represent a different portal, and that can be separately configured with theme colors, and a customer logo.

Many different aspects of the C2 UI can be customized based on the URL used to access the C2 UI.

Service Catalog

While users have always been able to create multi-server orders (that can even include a software defined network or two), C2 did not have a built in service catalog.  We do now.  Administrators can pre-create services, assign group and environment permissions, and make those services available to other C2 users.  A service for CloudBolt C2 is any combination of servers, applications, networks, and environments.  In short, anything that can be ordered in C2 can be made into a service, allowing easy ordering of complicated services and application stacks.

C2 makes it easy to create fully-contained services, and make them availble to your users.

Abstraction Layer 2.0

A key aspect of C2’s architecture is that the abstraction layer allows us to rapidly develop new connectors to additional technologies.  The process of developing a connector is much easier once we have developed a connector class that contains all of the appropriate data model and orchestration components in the C2 internals.  C2 v4.0 contains two important updates to the Abstraction Layer:

• New connector class: External Orchestrators
• Open API for customer-written connectors

The new connector class supports external orchestrators (also known as runbook automation tools).  Once your External Orchestrator is connected into CloudBolt, C2 Administrators will gain the ability to call nearly any contained workflow at multiple points during the provisioning, decommissioning, power status change, and health check processes.  Users with the correct permissions will also be able to see, and execute, specific external workflows from within the server view.

C2 can import and directly execute workflows from HP Operations Orchestration and (soon) other orchestration tools as well.

Today we are shipping C2 v4.0 with a connector for HP Operations Orchestration (HPOO).  Want to connect to another external orchestrator such as VMware vCenter Orchestrator, or Microsoft System Center Orchestrator?  That capability is just a phone call away. 

CloudBolt already has unrivaled flexibility to integrate with external systems and custom systems using Orchestration hooks but sometimes a deeper integration is desired for custom developed configuration management tools or first gen cloud management tools that are being phased out over time.  C2 4.0’s Abstraction layer includes a new open API that allows customers or their services partners to write their own CloudBolt connectors. Ultimately these connectors can even take a path to full support from CloudBolt but regardless CloudBolt can be enhanced to connect to any tool that an environment may dictate.

Orchestration Hooks

Speaking of Orchestration Hooks, C2 v4.0 has an updated Orchestration Hook management UI.  C2 Administrators can completely manage the type and order of Orchestration Hook execution, and also now assign multiple hooks per step.  All from the UI.

The C2 Orchestration Hooks UI uses scripts and workflows to integrate nearly any technology external to C2. 

Connector Updates

We’ve added support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management (RHEV-M) to the list of currently supported Hypervisors. 

Puppet Configuration Management is now fully supported for Data Center Automation.  Environments with Puppet installations can now use C2 to automate the installation and management of applications in environments.  Users can be presented with a list of available applications, and select the desired ones to be installed.  Of course Puppet-managed applications also get the same License Management, permissioning, and rate metering that C2 provides.

Other Updates

C2 v4.0 now supports hosting the OVA on XenServer. 

We’ve also expanded the LDAP and AD integration, Administrators can now have multiple auth targets per C2 instance, and can support multiple domains in a single AD forest.  Additionally, the synchronization of user data between C2 and the authentication systems is richer, and includes more attributes.

Summary

The capabilities in C2 are both innovative, and also highly accessible.  Most administrators can install C2, and be using its intuitive interface to deploy virtual machines in under 20 minutes.  We’ve focused our efforts on innovating, but with a decided understanding that even the most innovative feature is useless if it takes three months to install and configure, and this is no different in C2 v4.0.

Want to see more?  Request a demonstration today.

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!

We continue to innovate C2, the next-generation cloud manager that provides the easiest self-service IT portal available on the market.

The development team has been hard at work, and is proud to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 v3.7.1. We've focused this release on feature enhancements that provide more information to the end user, as well as more administrative control over certain aspects of provisioning through C2 and managing C2 resources.

For end users and administrators alike, we've added a progress bar to the order details page. As jobs are executed, the progress bar will let the requestor know what a provisioning job’s progress is. As C2 allows for multi-server and multi-environment orders, this progress bar works equally well in single or multi-server orders.

When ordering a virtual machine, the requestor can now see the quota impact of the request in the ordering window. We have found that making this information visible to the end user results in more efficient request use of resources.

Administrators also have a new UI for managing CloudBolt Resource Pools. CloudBolt Resource Pools allow Administrators to create pools of IP addresses, VNC ports, and other parameters that would normally require manual input. For example, an administrator can assign a pool of IP addresses to C2, which will then automatically select and mark as used a resource as needed. CloudBolt will not allow a resource’s re-use until the existing resource is released. This allows C2 to further automate previously manual processes.

Also benefitting administrators is a more efficient VM synchronization engine. C2 now ingests and synchronizes VM information from VMware more efficiently, which has resulted in a significant performance improvement. This means that changes made to VMs using the vSphere or vCenter interface are more rapidly detected by C2. 

In v3.7.1, we've made similar performance improvements to the AMI import process for the Amazon Web Services connector.

Our deep integration with HP Server Automation continues to remain a priority. In addition to officially supporting HP Server Automation v9.14, we now support the import and installation of HP Server Automation OS Build Plans through the C2 interface. If you haven’t tried unifying your virtualization with your data center automation/configuration management, you’re really missing out.

As you can see, we've been pretty busy, but this was just a dot release! We've got some great things cooking in our development shop that you won't want to miss.

On behalf of the entire team here at CloudBolt, I’m excited to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 version 3.7.0. 

We continue to pull out all of the development stops in CloudBolt C2.  This latest version adds numerous improvements, and new features to help reduce the burden of IT and cloud management.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) support continues to strengthen.  Now, CloudBolt C2 will auto-create region-specific environments based on administrator-selected regions for EC2.  C2 will also list out the various AMIs admins want to make accessible to their users.  The best part is that this will work for any EC2-provided AMI, as well as customer-specific AMIs.  C2 also now provides for richer discover of running instances in EC2, so the server list and individual server views in C2 contain even more information about the related EC2 instance.  Keep your eyes peeled, because we’re going to continue adding capabilities to the AWS connector.

We believe that Network Virtualization from folks like Nicira by VMware will drastically change how IT organizations manage enterprises.  Our engineers have now enabled Network Virtualization support in the KVM connector, meaning administrators can now create and deploy virtualized networks on KVM-backed hosts using CloudBolt C2. 

One powerful aspect of CloudBolt C2 is that is it’s ability to apply actions to systems cross-environment.  Part of what was needed here was a multi-select capability that allowed users to multi-select where it makes sense to do so.  C2 now supports multi-select in the appropriate dialog boxes.

Provisioning instances is what CloudBolt C2 was built to do. When a user has no knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s good practice to at least let them know that something is happening.  With 3.7.0, C2 does a better job showing users the provisioning progress of their instance.

We're keeping busy over here at CloudBolt.  To prove it, our engineers have released C2 v3.6.1 with a bounty of new capabilities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS for the acronym-inclined) support continues to get better and better in C2.  We understand that many users will want to import the existing state of an AWS account, so now C2 will import a list of all the running virtual instances in a customer's AWS accounts.  

Happy that you're able to provision servers quicker than ever?  Want to brag about it?  C2 now presents users that ability to post a Facebook message bragging about how well your IT environment is run after they provsion a virtual machine using CloudBolt. Of course, administrators can toggle that feature on and off as needed/required.

What happens when something goes wrong with a VM deployment? v3.6.1 now gives you more information on the status of an order, and will tell you more about errors from the underlying virtualization or configuration management.

While we'd love to say that bugs never happen, the fact is that all software has bugs.  We grabbed our fly swatter and fixed a handful of issues in this release, including UI rendering fixes for Internet Explorer, situations where the remote console feature failed, and some corrected verbiage in various status messages.

Ready to upgrade?  Hit up our support portal (login required) for details.  Want to kick the tires?  Request a download now!

We're happy to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 v3.6.0!

Building on the ground-breaking Network Virtualization capabilites we released in v3.5.0, we've created the ability to directly manage network virtualization-provided layer 3 networking (i.e. routing) directly from C2.

C2 also now supports KVM-QEMU, further expanding the supported virtualization platforms that it centrally manages.

We've also added many more visual cues throught the user interface. You'll now see appropriate vendor icons for items including resource handlers like VMware vSphere and vCenter, AWS and QEMU, as well as Operating Systems, Configuration Management systems (Puppet, Chef, HP Server Automation), and Network Virtualization (Nicira by VMware).

Do you have a large number of users, but don't want to connect C2 to LDAP or Active Directory? Not a problem anymore, as C2 can now import users from a csv file.

From the beginning, CloudBolt enables plain old virtualzation environments to provide resources in a Cloud-ified manner: virtualization becomes Infrastructure as a Service and Platfform as a Service.  Strating with v3.6.0, we enable users to request multiple servers from multiple environments.  Previously, they could request multiple servers, but only from on envronment at a time.

We've also invested a bunch of time in performance tuning the UI, including adding capabilities to filter the server list by the OS family a server belongs to.

C2 can also now query a Configuration Management system to determine which virtual machines in your environment are also managed by a supported CM system so that C2 can enable more fine-grained application and life-cycle management of those VMs.

Ready to upgrade?  Hit up our support portal (login required) for details.  Want to kick the tires?  Request a download now!