Mirantis releases Fuel for OpenStack 3.0

Mirantis has announced version 3.0 of its Fuel deployment tools for OpenStack. The tools are based around the open source Fuel Library. Mirantis, which specialises in OpenStack integration, also announced that it has raised another $10 million, with Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures investing in the company. The Fuel tools are open source, but later this year Mirantis plans to launch Fuel Enterprise.

The new version of Fuel has support for the most recent OpenStack release, Grizzly, with support for deploying the new Nova (compute) conductor service. Fuel is an "Open Stack Do-it-Yourself Kit" which works with Puppet configuration management and Cobbler bare metal provisioning and includes all the core OpenStack components. Fuel Web is a web-based front end to Fuel. A video demonstrates how Fuel and Fuel Web 3.0 works in practice.

Fuel 3.0 demonstrated.

Fuel 3.0 now supports deployments on CentOS 6.4, using it as the base operating system for the Fuel master node and deployed slave nodes too. CentOS 6.4 is included in the Fuel Library ISO image. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is still a deployment option and is expected to be joined by Ubuntu in a future Fuel maintenance release.

The new release also allows the addition of new nodes to a cloud without redeploying to them, removing the need to tear down and rebuild nodes. Cinder, the block storage component of OpenStack, can now be deployed standalone onto nodes and there is now user-definable disk allocation for the base OS, Cinder and virtual machines. Deployment scripts for VirtualBox have also been updated so VMs more resemble a production system. The Fuel library itself is now able to install Swift, the OpenStack object storage layer, in a single pass, rather than needing multiple passes like before, which reduces the time taken to deploy HA configurations.

There are also networking improvements, with network partitioning over multiple network interface cards, Fuel Web mapping of logical networks to physical interfaces, various security improvements, NIC bonding and an improved firewall module.

Fuel is available to download by signing up at fuel.mirantis.com for access to a site which offers an ISO image download, VirtualBox scripts and a quickstart guide. All original software from Mirantis is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence with the code for Fuel Library being available on Mirantis's GitHub repository; Mirantis says this repository will be updated to Fuel 3.0 soon.

(djwm)