SUSE Releases New OS Based on Icehouse OpenStack
SUSE is the popular Linux distribution that is increasingly being used by administrators to setup on-premises IaaS cloud services. SUSE released their newest version on Wednesday and the distribution instantly shot up into the top 6 at DistroWatch.
SUSE mentions that, “SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise distribution with automated high availability (HA) configuration and deployment of the OpenStack cloud services. This ensures the continuous operation of private cloud deployments and the delivery of enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements (SLA).”
This release of SUSE notoriously supports multiple hypervisors that allow different types of clouds to better interact. KVM, XEN, Hyper-V and vSphere can all operate alongside SUSE. SUSE goes on to say, “SUSE Cloud now includes advanced VMware capabilities for image management and support for VMware Virtual SAN, in addition to previous support for VMware vSphere compute nodes, VMware NSX network virtualization and the vSphere driver for block storage, automation and availability features to ease enterprise adoption of OpenStack and help organizations maximize current IT investments.”
Another added bonus is that this release supports Ceph distributed storage capabilities. SUSE says, “SUSE Cloud makes it easy and cost effective to implement a highly available, mixed-hypervisor private cloud infrastructure. And the addition of Ceph distributed storage capabilities increases the value and flexibility of SUSE Cloud in almost any enterprise.”
The flexibility of this new OpenStack SUSE flavored release is the main reason many organizations will give this private cloud services suite a chance. Since the distribution can be downloaded, many cloud computing enthusiasts have noted in forums that they are testing this release out in their development environments. Jonathan Bryce, an Executive Director at OpenStack, commented on the release by saying, “The OpenStack project is seeing increasingly wide adoption by enterprises. We’ve heard from enterprise users that high availability, integration with their preferred tools and platforms, and access to the latest upstream innovation is important, and that’s exactly the market SUSE is reaching for with Ceph integration and HA tools.”
