CloudStack 4.3 was released last week. There are plenty of new features and improvements added to what was already a great cloud platform. The release comes ahead of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference, which is next week April 9 - 11th.

There are way too many new features to go through but I’m glad to see dynamic compute offerings, LDAP user provisioning and database high availability support get added to this version. Remote VPN access for VPC networks and Hyper-V support are two more features of interest that I can’t wait to start playing with. Some of the noteworthy new and improved features include:

• Support for Microsoft Hyper-V - Apache CloudStack can now manage Hyper-V hypervisors in addition to KVM, XenServer, VMware, LXC, and Bare Metal
• Juniper OpenContrail integration - OpenContrail is a software defined
  networking controller from Juniper that CloudStack now integrates with
  to provide SDN services
• SSL Termination support for guest VMs - Apache CloudStack can configure and manage SSL termination in certain load balancer devices
• Palo Alto Firewall integration - Apache CloudStack can now manage and configure Palo Alto firewalls
• Remote access VPN for VPC networks - CloudStack’s remote access VPN is now available for Virtual Private Cloud networks
• Site to Site VPN between VRs - CloudStack now allows site-to-site VPN connectivity to it’s virtual routing devices. This permits your cloud
  computing environment to appear as a natural extension of your local
  network, or for you to easily interconnect multiple environments
• VXLAN support expansion to include KVM - CloudStack’s support for
  integrating VXLAN, the network virtualization technology that attempts
  to ameliorate scalability problems with traditional networking
• SolidFire plugin extension to support KVM and hypervisor snapshots for XenServer and ESX - SolidFire provides guaranteed Storage Quality of Service at the Virtual Machine level
• Dynamic Compute offering - CloudStack now has the ability to dynamically scale the resources assigned to a running virtual machine instance for those hypervisors which support it

If you’re installing CloudStack for the first time or installing a new 4.3 environment you should have no issues. The setup and install process is still painlessly simple. Official installation, administration, and API documentation for each release is available at http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/latest.