Forge your private cloud.
A modern, open-source cloud platform management solution purpose-built for organizations running Hyper-V (Windows Server Failover Clustering) and Azure Local hybrid cloud environments — covering the full infrastructure lifecycle from design to retirement.
Deployments and early access are managed via cloudsmith.app
CloudSmith isn't something you adopt all at once. Enable the modules that match your workflow today and grow into the rest when you're ready — or never. No bloat, no forced features, no compromises.
Plan, deploy, operate, update, and troubleshoot Hyper-V and Azure Local environments from one place — not a collection of scripts and spreadsheets.
Intelligent log analysis, pattern matching against known issues, and guided troubleshooting. AI enhances your team — your engineers make the calls.
Manage multiple customers and sites from a single control plane. Built for managed service providers from day one, not bolted on after the fact.
Purpose-built lightweight agents run directly on each Hyper-V and Azure Local host — fast, secure, no inbound firewall rules. Agentless fallback via PowerShell remoting and WinRM for environments where agent deployment isn't possible.
Dell iDRAC, Lenovo XCC, and HPE iLO are all first-class targets — unified behind a single hardware abstraction layer. Firmware inventory, health monitoring, boot control, virtual media, and out-of-band operations across all three vendors from day one.
End-to-end firmware and driver management across your fleet — inventory, update planning, coordinated rollout with rollback. The gap every other platform leaves open. CloudSmith owns it.
Use only what your environment needs — nothing more. Enable the Planning module, the Hardware module, or Troubleshooting alone. Every capability installs, upgrades, and removes independently without taking the platform down. Community and OEM partners can ship their own modules.
Standalone on-prem. Azure PaaS. Federated hybrid where both control planes operate independently. Multi-site on-prem federation with no cloud dependency. One platform, five deployment models — run it where your environment demands.
Designed for the community from day one. Self-host it, extend it, contribute to it. No proprietary lock-in, no vendor licensing, no surprises.
Hyper-V is an exceptional hypervisor. After years running it in production — from small businesses to large enterprises — I have never found a reason to question the technology itself. The problem has always been the management tooling around it.
Microsoft gave us System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and it was genuinely great. But it required a separate license, a dedicated server, and its own maintenance burden just to keep the management platform running. Open source alternatives are limited and fragmented. Third-party tools range from expensive to eye-wateringly expensive — for capabilities that should come standard with the platform. Nobody should have to pay thousands of dollars a year to properly manage a hypervisor that Microsoft includes with Windows Server.
My goal is to build the tool that should already exist: a full-lifecycle management platform for Hyper-V and Azure Local — open source, free — that takes any organization from initial design and capacity planning all the way through deployment, daily operations, updates, hardware management, and eventual retirement. Small business with three servers. Large enterprise with three hundred nodes. Same quality of tooling, no licensing fees, no vendor lock-in.
That is the gap. CloudSmith is my attempt to close it. If you share that goal and want to help make it happen, I can always use the help.
— Kris Turner, Hybrid Cloud Solutions