Rackspace rolls out improved Private Cloud

How OpenCenter integrates the Rackspace Private Cloud
Source: Rackspace Rackspace has rolled out a new version – 3.0 – of its free and open source based Private Cloud software. Introduced originally in August 2012 as a pre-imaged Ubuntu 12.04 LTS only distribution, Rackspace's latest version now supports systems with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 or 6.4, and CentOS 6.3 installed on them. The latest release's highlight, though, is the addition of OpenCenter, a server/client/agent solution to assist with configuring and provisioning Rackspace Private Cloud systems.

A Getting Started Guide covers how to install OpenCenter server and agent on virtual machines or physical systems and then use it to create a Chef server to manage the nodes, deploy controllers nodes and hypervisors, and create Nova compute clusters. Further documentation covers the other aspects of the system.

Based on the Folsom release of OpenStack, Rackspace Private Cloud 3.0 supports OpenStack's Compute (Nova), Image Service (Glance), Dashboard (Horizon), and Identity management (KeyStone). It does not support the virtual networking service Quantum and omits support for Nova's object store and volumes, though Swift and Cinder (Object and Block Storage) can be installed separately. It also only supports KVM hypervisors.

The Rackspace Private Cloud software is available to download (after filling out a registration form) from Rackspace's web site. The source code for it is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0 and is available from one of the company's GitHub repositories.

(djwm)