Before we popped the bubbly to celebrate the new year, we released Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 as a late holiday gift. Here’s a quick overview of some of the new features and functionality we put into this version.
Mirantis OpenStack hardened packages support the latest stable OpenStack Havana maintenance release
One of the amazing benefits of OpenStack is how often new innovation is delivered by the community. We here at Mirantis are committed to making that new innovation available as quickly as possible to our users while ensuring that the technology has been tested and hardened for real world business workloads.
The OpenStack core projects included in the Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 hardened packages have been synchronized with the OpenStack Havana 2013.2.1 release. And, of course, the open source Fuel deployment and management tool, part of Mirantis OpenStack from the start, has now been enhanced to install all of these additional versions and packages. Fuel will deploy this 2013.2.1 version of OpenStack on either CentOS or Ubuntu.
Ceilometer and Heat are included in hardened packages
The big news in OpenStack Havana was that Heat and Ceilometer graduated to integrated status. Officially, they’re referred to as OpenStack Orchestration Service and OpenStack Telemetry Service, although most folks still call them Heat and Ceilometer.
These newly integrated Heat and Ceilometer projects are also included in the Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 hardened packages. Heat is automatically deployed into each new environment. Ceilometer can optionally be deployed by Fuel on a per-environment basis.
Murano has been updated to version 0.4
The Murano Project introduces an application catalog that allows application developers and cloud administrators to publish various cloud-ready applications in a browsable categorized way. Once published, you can use these applications and services regardless of your experience level, and they will provide reliable environments at the push of a button. The key goal is to have a UI and API that will allow you to compose and deploy composite environments on the application abstraction level and then manage their lifecycles. The Murano service is capable of orchestrating complex circularly dependent cases in order to set up complete environments with many dependant applications and services. However, the actual deployment itself is by the existing software orchestration tools (such as Heat), while the Murano project becomes an integration point for various applications and services.
Version 0.4 of Murano includes a metadata repository service used to store deployment scenarios and support for Linux services. The demo image has also been updated and now includes the Murano agent, which can be used to test the cluster deployment with the Murano service. Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 includes and deploys this 0.4 version of Murano.
Other Enhancements
Ceph storage support expanded (experimental)
Ceph storage support is still experimental due to a known Ceph issue, so we wouldn’t recommend using this in production. However, the Nova (Compute) service in Mirantis OpenStack now supports VM instances backed by ephemeral volumes stored in Ceph. With Glance, Cinder, and Nova all supporting the Ceph RBD backend, OpenStack VM instances can take advantage of Ceph clustered storage capabilities through all of the steps of their lifecycle. Ephemeral volumes can be created as copy-on-write clones of Glance images, recovered from Compute node failures thanks to Ceph object replication, and shared among Compute nodes to enable a live migration of VMs.
Bear in mind that there is a small possibility that an ephemeral volume may become corrupted when using this feature because of a Ceph SEGV error while extracting cloned images from RBD. Mirantis is working closely with Inktank to resolve this issue and release a patch as soon as possible.
Internationalization of the Fuel UI is now available (experimental)
The Fuel project has added a framework that enables partners and community members to localize the Fuel UI by modifying the translate.json file. A sample that translates the UI into zh-CN (Simplified Chinese) has been created by a community partner, 99cloud, and can be found in the file. The framework is currently experimental, but we encourage community members to try it out.
Added selective node deployment/provisioning
In earlier releases, the Fuel UI and CLI deployed the operating system and OpenStack components in a single action activated by the “Deploy Changes” button on the UI or the deploy command via CLI. In Mirantis OpenStack 4.0, it is possible to deploy the operating system and OpenStack components in separate actions. This option is not expected to be used for typical deployments but may be useful in focused development or testing scenarios like OpenStack scalability testing as part of the OpenStack Rally project.
Validation of user-supplied network settings has been improved
Additional error checking has been added to the Fuel UI when entering information into the network settings under the Network tab. A full list of the limitations that are checked can be found on OpenStack Etherpad.
Performance of virtual machines
The default value for the CPU governor on Compute nodes has been changed to ‘performance’. This change is expected to increase the overall speed and responsiveness of virtual machines for almost all physical hardware.
Next Steps
We hope you get a chance to try out this latest version and see what OpenStack Havana can do for you. You can download Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 from our website and try it out in your lab or try it out in your own VirtualBox environment. For more detailed information about what’s in Mirantis OpenStack 4.0, you can also read the Release Notes,
Here’s to a great 2014!
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