Ubuntu 13.10 delivers faster cloud setup and management for scale-out environments

• Ubuntu Server 13.10 is available from 17th October; first fully supported release of the new OpenStack Havana, with faster node installation and a new version of Juju that supports ultra-dense containerised application deployment.

Canonical today announced that the next version of Ubuntu for server and cloud environments will be released on 17 October 2013.

“Ubuntu 13.10 delivers the latest and best version of OpenStack, and is the fastest, most flexible platform for scale-out computing,” says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and VP Products for Canonical. “Ubuntu is typically used in very large scale deployments. In this release we’ve tuned the cloud deployment experience for very small clusters as well, to support dev-and-test environments.” This 13.10 release makes it possible to deploy a full OpenStack cloud on only 5 servers and offers a sophisticated Landscape dashboard for the management of Ubuntu OpenStack clouds no matter their size.

Enterprise management of OpenStack clouds and the workloads deployed on them has been a focus for Canonical in the latest development cycle. “With Landscape, we simplify the lives of enterprise compliance and administration teams, with a full suite of compliance, performance monitoring and security update tools that work on all cloud and physical environments. Now we’ve added real-time dashboards for your OpenStack cloud, too” says Federico Lucifredi, who leads Ubuntu server product management.

While Ubuntu itself is an operating system, much of the recent work by Canonical and the Ubuntu community has been to deliver complete solutions and applications on top of it. The breakthrough Juju service orchestration tool from Canonical makes it easy to design, deploy, manage and scale workloads securely from a browser or the command line. In 13.10, Juju can instantly deploy an entire software environment or service as a “bundle” directly from the easy-to-use Juju GUI, improving on the previous deployment of individual components. This reduces complexity and enables administrators to share entire complex workloads consisting of many related parts.

Ubuntu leads the way with integration between OpenStack and VMware vSphere so ESXi users can interoperate with OpenStack. “The ability to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack alongside ESXi with orchestration that spans both properties is extremely valuable, bringing OpenStack right to the centre of common enterprise virtualisation practice” said Mark Shuttleworth.

13.10 introduces Juju management of LXC containers, which allow multiple services to run on the same physical or virtual machine. This gives sysadmins the option of greater density, reducing the total number of machines required to run a service, and reducing cost.

A new installer enables very rapid provisioning of thousands of nodes, typically five times faster than the best traditional Linux installation process. Ubuntu is uniquely suited to rapid provisioning and re-provisioning in large-scale data centres. The Ubuntu LXC update in 13.10 provides blindingly fast (less than one second) and efficient cloning of containers for faster scaling of containerised services, unique to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu’s OpenStack distribution brings the famous “Ubuntu Just Works” usability to complex cloud deployment; clouds are simple to design, deploy and scale for private or public purposes. Ubuntu 13.10 includes Havana, the latest version of OpenStack, with new and updated tools such as Ceilometer for metering and monitoring, and Heat for auto-scaling.

Havana is also available to customers on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS thanks to the 12.04 Cloud Archive, from Canonical. This means that LTS users can get access to the latest Ubuntu OpenStack release, tools and features while continuing to enjoy the stability and maintenance commitment that backs our current LTS.

Availability
Ubuntu Server 13.10 will be available for download from the 17th October 2013 at: http://www.ubuntu.com/download.  OpenStack Havana release notes: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/Havana