Whitepaper · 10 pages · September 2026

Private Cloud on CloudStack and Ceph

Architecture, change process, upgrades and monitoring for a two-region KVM cloud, with eight lessons from production

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Cover of the Building and Operating a Private Cloud on Apache CloudStack and Ceph whitepaper

A practitioner guide to how ZSoftly builds and runs the ZSoftly Cloud Platform. It covers reference architecture, Ceph pool and placement design, VXLAN networking, and numbered Ansible playbooks. It also covers CloudStack and Ceph upgrades, host patching, per-region monitoring and a readiness checklist.

Apache CloudStack
Ceph
KVM
Ansible
Observability

Production Lessons: 8; Each with the control that prevents a repeat
Readiness Checks: 10; To test your own estate
Ceph Monitors: 3; The production minimum
Public Sources: 16; Every fact links to the docs

Inside

What the paper covers

Reference Architecture
Management plane, database, KVM clusters, system VMs and one Ceph cluster per region
Replica Policy
When size 3 applies, when size 2 is tolerable, and why size 2 with min_size 1 never is
VXLAN Networking
Why multicast group limits and CPU mode decide whether networks and live migration work
Numbered Playbooks
Region-scoped inventories, reviewed dry runs and one change, then verify
Upgrades and Patching
CloudStack and cephadm upgrade steps and a host patch routine that confirms the reboot
Monitoring That Pages Once
Per-region stacks, federation for dashboards only, and a peer watchdog

Steps

The migration, step by step

01Assess against the checklistStep 1
02Design zone, storage and networkStep 2
03Build as roles and playbooksStep 3
04Operate upgrades and patchingStep 4
05Hand over code and runbooksStep 5

Private Cloud on CloudStack and Ceph

What the paper covers

Reference Architecture

Replica Policy

VXLAN Networking

Numbered Playbooks

Upgrades and Patching

Monitoring That Pages Once

The migration, step by step

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