What’s New in 8.7—Going Deeper into the Clouds

With each release of CloudBolt, we introduce new features, enhance existing ones, and fix issues brought to our attention from our customers. We also want to thank a CloudBolt Champion and recognize their efforts in making us the market-leading hybrid cloud management solution for enterprises and organizations.

This release is named after Ricardo Lupi Nogueira from NOS, a leading media company in Portugal. As a Solutions Architect for NOS, he’s explained to us that CloudBolt’s environment concept and plugin-based orchestration is what really empowered him to do his work; it’s flexible enough that it lets him customize VM provisioning for each client.

In this new release of CloudBolt, we’ve focused on richer connections to cloud environments as many of our customers continue to expand their environments in new and existing private and public clouds. We’ve added new and enhanced support for our most widely used Resource Handlers—AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, and VMware.

Here are some of the main highlights:

AWS

Reserved Instances—When EC2 instances running in AWS have a predictable pattern of resource usage over time, they are often good candidates to use cost-saving, AWS reserved instances. Instead of AWS billing on a pay-as-you-go on-demand rate, the reserved instances have a set price that is lower if you pay for them ahead of time, partially or in full. CloudBolt now provides support for recommending reserved instances based on the past days of usage you set over your subscription duration. CloudBolt will list the EC2 instance candidates and then provide recommendations based on your current spending and what you can save.

Multiple Region Support

AWS GovCloud and AWS China—Along with our ongoing updates to our main AWS resource handler, we have support for two special AWS resource handlers and corresponding environments. In prior releases, we supported only one region for each resource handler. In this release, we now have the ability to support multiple regions for these resource handlers. AWS GovCloud has two regions and AWS China has several.

Azure

Resizing VMs—This release supports a new server action that resizes Azure virtual machines. For example, your VM might have only 3 or 4 disks available and you need more. You can go to the server page for an Azure VM, click Resize VM, and then select a new size rather than having to rebuild an entirely new VM just to have more disks.

Scale Sets—Virtual machines that are members of Azure Scale Sets will now be synchronized to CloudBolt. Scale sets in Azure are sets of identical VMs that provide specific services that need to scale with demand to run efficiently. They scale up with increased demand and then scale back down as necessary so they are not running continuously in a ready state.

Google Cloud

Multiple GCP Projects—The release supports synchronizing multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) projects using the Google Compute Engine resource handler. You can choose which GCP projects you’d like CloudBolt to manage by clicking the Fetch Projects button from the Projects tab of the resource handler.

OpenStack

Snapshots—You can now take a snapshot of an OpenStack instance in CloudBolt and revert back to it at any time. The open-source nature and customization often involved with OpenStack can get very tedious without the ability to preserve stable instances in an iterative process instead of having to rebuild the instance from scratch. To take a snapshot of an OpenStack server in CloudBolt, click “Create Snapshot” server action available on the server details page. To revert the server back to a snapshot, click “Revert to Snapshot” server action on the server details page.

VMware

IPv6—When synchronizing virtual machines to servers from VMware VSphere to CloudBolt, both IPv6 addresses in addition to IPv4 addresses will be considered. There are also new options in the Miscellaneous tab that allow you to select using IPv4 or IPv6 addresses for remote scripts or let the resource handler select the preferred one from vCenter.

Other Cool Stuff

Spelling—In larger deployments, the efficiency of tagging with the correct strings for tag values is critical but often plagued with spelling errors that make it difficult to manage sets of VMs based on specific tags for business units, billing inquiries, and any number of other factors. From the Tag tab in this new release, you can configure the common spelling errors to be mapped to the correct spelling.


When the tags are synchronized to the target environment, the tag values are corrected. This new feature has been added to AWS, Azure, and VMWare resource handlers.

Plugin Code—We’ve added the ability to revert plugin code back to the Out-of-the-box version, which will save time in having to copy and paste to a backup editor. To use this feature, go to a provided plugin or remote script which has edits made to the code and click “Revert Changes.”

CloudBolt Release Notes

For more detailed information about all the new features and enhancements, see the Release Notes.