Linux vendor SUSE today announced the general availability of its SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 distribution, providing users with an updated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. The SUSE OpenStack Cloud product is a rebranding of the SUSE Cloud product that first entered the market in August 2012.
“With the adoption of DefCore, the rules around the use of the OpenStack trademarks are clearer,” Pete Chadwick, senior product manager for SUSE OpenStack Cloud, told eWEEK. “We fully support DefCore and felt the name change would increase visibility around this.”
DefCore is an effort within the OpenStack community to define what constitutes an OpenStack cloud.
In a 2014 video interview with eWEEK, Alan Clark, director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open-Source at SUSE detailed the latest DefCore efforts. Clark is also the chairman of the OpenStack Foundation’s board of directors.
SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is based on the upstream OpenStack Juno milestone first released on Oct. 16, 2014. Among the new technologies that landed in OpenStack Juno is the Sahara big data processing project. The SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 platform includes Sahara, and SUSE is also working with big data vendor MapR to enable support for the MapR enterprise distribution of Hadoop via the MapR Sahara plug-in.
On the networking front, the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 release now supports the Midokura MidoNet software-defined networking (SDN) platform, which can be integrated with the OpenStack Neutron networking project. Chadwick noted that Midokura has tested its Neutron plug-in with SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5, and SUSE and Midokura can now jointly support customers that deploy the integrated solution.
Another improvement in SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is an enhanced installer. From the very first SUSE Cloud release, SUSE has been leveraging the Dell Crowbar open-source project for OpenStack installation.
The SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 installer is still based on Crowbar, but it has been enhanced significantly since Dell stopped working on the code base, Chadwick explained.
“Some of the enhancements include automated HA [high-availability] configuration of clusters for control services, support for additional projects, integration with third-party adapters for Cinder storage and Neutron networking, updated back-end for improved performance and various usability enhancements,” Chadwick said.
SUSE’s approach to enabling OpenStack is a bit different from that of its rival Red Hat.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, announced Feb. 17, leverages a customized edition of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux as the underlying operating system.
For OpenStack Cloud 6, SUSE is not using a special version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Chadwick said.
“For the control plane, we still run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3, and SUSE OpenStack Cloud is installed as an add-on product,” Chadwick said. “Customers can deploy either SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 as compute nodes.”
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 was released Oct. 27, 2014, while the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 came out July 8, 2013.
While SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 adds multiple new features, it isn’t adding support for Docker containers. “We do not yet support the Docker integration in SUSE OpenStack Cloud,” Chadwick said. “It is currently a tech preview in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.