Eucalyptus Open Source Cloud Gets High-Availability Injection
In Eucalyptus 3, the third edition of the on-premise cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) software, which is set for pre-release next month, high-availability takes center stage, said CEO Marten Mickos.
"High availability is notoriously difficult to develop," Mickos said, adding that Eucalyptus worked on the latest version for 18 months. But high-availability is something cloud users have been clamoring for, in this world where the reliability bar is set high and sites and applications "must always be online," he said.
Mickos said that if something fails, the Eucalyptus 3 open source cloud software puts other nodes into use immediately and operation will continue uninterrupted. Basically, the cloud will be available regardless of hardware failure, Mickos said. There is no single point of failure and if there is a failure in a disk drive, a network or a power outage, the Eucalyptus 3 will trigger a fail-over to a "hot spare" service running concurrently on a different physical machine.
Along with high-availability, Eucalyptus 3 also features updated resource access controls (RAC) that let cloud administrators tune user group management, perform cost tracking and gain more detailed visibility into cloud usage. Other new RAC features in Eucalyptus 3 include implementation support for Amazon Web Services Identity and Access Management API and new service-level management mechanisms to let users apply more control over user groups. Additionally, Eucalyptus 3 users can automatically map definitions from enterprise LDAP and Active Directory (AD) servers to Eucalyptus accounts, groups and users; and the new version of the software includes expanded account and resource reporting interfaces for integration with existing data center chargeback and billing systems.
Eucalyptus 3 also adds a range of cloud storage resources and platform enhancements like AWS boot from EBS, NetAPP and JBOD EBS SAN drivers, integration with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and standard LDAP servers, and support for VMware 4.1, RHEL 6.0 and KVM.
According to Eucalyptus Vice President of Marketing David Barber, the new features in Eucalyptus 3 give partners, such as systems integrators, new tools to take to customers and "take Eucalyptus to enterprise-class clouds." Butler added that the new RAC features also open the door for new cloud management capabilities for partners and cloud providers.
Mickos said a pre-release version of Eucalyptus 3 open source software will be available for download within the next month.