If
you used the SUSE Cloud 3 OpenStack Admin Appliance, you know it was
a downloadable, OpenStack Havana-based appliance, which even a
non-technical user could get off the ground to deploy an OpenStack
cloud. Today, I am excited to tell you about the new Icehouse-based
SUSE Cloud 4 OpenStack Admin Appliance.
With
that initial SUSE Cloud 3 release, there were two
versions: Standard and Embedded. After feedback from users it was
clear that the user experience was not much different between the
two, and the important goal was to reduce the overall size of the
download. To address the situation, I came up with some innovations
that led to a single, smaller image that incorporates the
functionality of both the Standard and Embedded versions.
The
new appliance incorporates all of the needed software and
repositories to set up, stage and deploy OpenStack Icehouse in your
sandbox lab, or production environments. Coupled with it are the
added benefits of automated deployment of highly available cloud
services, support for mixed-hypervisor clouds containing KVM, Xen,
Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, support from our
award-winning, worldwide service organization and integration with
SUSE Engineered maintenance processes. In addition, there is
integration with tools such as SUSE Studio™ and SUSE Manager to
help you build and manage your cloud applications.
With
the availability of SUSE Cloud 4, and based on feedback from
partners, vendors and customers deploying OpenStack, it was time to
release a new and improved Admin Appliance. This new image
incorporates the most common use cases and is flexible enough to add
in other components such as SMT (Subscription Management Tool) and
SUSE Customer Center registration, so you can keep your cloud
infrastructure updated.
The
creation of the SUSE Cloud 4 OpenStack Admin Appliance is intended to
provide a quick and easy deployment. The partners and vendors we are
working with find it useful to quickly test their applications in
SUSE Cloud and validate their use case. For customers it has become a
great tool for deploying production private clouds based on
OpenStack.
With
version
4.0.x you can proceed with the following to get moving now with
OpenStack.
Its
important that you start by reading and understanding the Deployment
Guide before proceeding. This will give you some insight into the
requirements and an overall understanding of what is involved to
deploy your own private cloud.
See
the SUSE
Cloud 4 Deployment Guide
As a
companion to the Deployment Guide we have provided a questionnaire
that will help you answer and
organize the critical steps talked about in the Deployment
Guide.
See
the SUSE
Cloud Questionnaire
To
help you get moving quickly the SUSE
Cloud OpenStack
Admin
Appliance Guide provides instructions on using the appliance and
details a step-by-step installation.
The
most updated guide will always be here
Changes
from Github Project
-
This version contains the GM version of SUSE Cloud 4 and any updates
to this date
-
Prepare source
for
SUSE Cloud 4 media and
requirements
-
Added proxy as a module in the firstboot phase
-
Added HA patches
-
Replaced lamp_server pattern with SMT server pattern, so SMT is now
integrated
-
Added ability to grab SMT repos from external USB drive source.
Inherent now with the image
-
Added ability to attach to remote SMT. Inherent now with the image
-
Reformatted the SLES 11 SP3 update repo into a mini formatted repo
-
Redesigned firstboot
-
Removed build repos from appliance after build phase
Now
is the time. Go out to http://www.suse.com/suse-cloud-appliances
and start downloading version 4, walk through the Appliance Guide,
and see how quick and easy it can be to set up OpenStack. Don't stop
there. Make it highly available and set up more than one hypervisor,
and don't forget to have a lot of fun.
Enjoy!
