Question on modern Windows hypervisors and windows agent versus external framework.

[alsko-icom]

Howdy team, I am new to this community and with my team (Public Cloud Provider engineers) we are trying out cloudstack 4.20 with kvm on redhat8 (considering also rocky 9.5) and would like to ask if the agent for windows is available for download anywhere.

After microsoft ditched Azure Pack (first created for win 2012 and supported up to 2026), they decided to offer front end through public Azure which is a bad idea for a public cloud provider to sell something through competition...

I have had a difficult time trying to build on my own and I have some references missing. If I persist on it, I may end up on the wall as I want to test it using windows 2019-2022-2025 datacenter hypervisors and it was originaly created over 10 years ago. Going through search of the word "windows" under the issues github list, I came across the External Deployment Integration in CloudStack

This looks promising. However there are some .sh scripts described that I am not sure I can run on windows but I see it may work too (https://git-scm.com/downloads). Am I on the right page here?

Best regards to all the team !

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[NuxRo]

Hello @alsko-icom - to clarify, you want to use MS HyperV as a hypervisor with CloudStack? It's not supported and indeed the closest thing to it is the External Deployment Integration.

Doing it this way will not be like a proper "class 1" supported hypervisor, it will only allow very basic operations, like create, destroy.. no networking, no stats and so on.

Why is the reason for wanting to use Windows HyperV? Perhaps we can address it there.

[alsko-icom]

Thanks for the clarification. Yes I want to test Microsoft Datacenter Servers as a small 2-node cluster to see how it works. My main hypervisors are redhat8 and possibly rocky 9. Hyper-V is just a side idea. We are already offering services through Hyper-v but the product is headless. No portal to manage start/stop VMs, no console. Basic operations would be nice to have. So, if the .sh scripts are doable let me know the best approach (would you have a walkthrough/guide for deploying or general suggestions?) and I will try it out! Thanks again for your input. /alsko

[alsko-icom]

I went through the article https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/External+Deployment+Integration+in+CloudStack

but I am not sure if any other steps are involved to make this work? can you suggest a high level guide of a few steps how to implement? What would be required on the Windows Hypervisor host?

[harikrishna-patnala]

Hi @alsko-icom

It's great to hear about the use case! Yes, external deployment integration can make it work. However, it is currently under development and likely in its final stages: GitHub PR #9752. Please keep an eye on the PR and the release for its availability.

If you would like to learn more about how it works, you can check out our presentation at CCC2024: YouTube Link.

Regarding your question about the scripts, they will be executed on the management server, not the MS Hyper-V host. So, you can plan the management server OS accordingly. I also believe there may be some hacky ways to run these on Windows as well.