Mirantis unveils Mirantis OpenStack 5.0

Mirantis has announced the availability of Version 5.0 of its zero lock-in OpenStack distribution. Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 is fully updated with the latest OpenStack release, Icehouse, and features interoperability between VMware and OpenStack environments. Fuel, the open source deployment and management tool for OpenStack, is integrated in the release, and gives users an intuitive, GUI-driven experience that lets them set up or change a fully-functional OpenStack cloud in a matter of minutes; Fuel also uses Docker technology to make the control plane itself more maintainable.

“We’re witnessing unprecedented demand for OpenStack by organizations large and small as more and more enterprises embrace private clouds and adopt OpenStack as their preferred platform,” said Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis. “With Mirantis OpenStack 5.0, we are offering customers a future-proof solution for OpenStack, along with key new features that help make OpenStack robust enough to support mission-critical workloads.”

Support for interoperability with VMware vCenter™ Server, is a key new benefit of Mirantis OpenStack 5.0. Now customers using VMware vCenter Server environments can deploy and control workloads that run directly on VMware vSphere in their VMware vCenter Server clusters directly from Mirantis OpenStack, as an alternative to KVM. In this way, VMware resources are made available transparently within the pool of compute resources assigned through the OpenStack Horizon console.
The result is a powerful, easy-to-manage datacenter solution, allowing datacenter and cloud operators to take advantage of OpenStack innovation while helping to maximize previous investments in existing VMware infrastructure. Mirantis OpenStack subscribers are covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, with Mirantis technical support providing full support for OpenStack components, and helping customers work with their VMware technical support team regarding VMware technologies.

“Our partnership with Mirantis is an example of how VMware promotes customer choice, giving organizations many options for how to build a cloud that includes compute, network, storage or management technologies from VMware,” said Dan Wendlandt, director of product management at VMware. “Mirantis' impressive track-record with OpenStack, combined with Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 interoperability with VMware vCenter™ Server, provides customers with a proven combination to implement OpenStack cloud APIs on top of VMware's enterprise-grade infrastructure."

Fuel, the open source control plane included in Mirantis OpenStack 5.0, now includes two essential new capabilities for forward upgrade compatibility. Popular with OpenStack operators for its robust automation and ease of use, Fuel will now let customers manage clusters run any future releases of OpenStack (typically made available every 6 to 8 weeks) alongside their existing Icehouse-based clouds. In addition, the Fuel master node, which controls deployment automation, is now packaged using Docker containers. This makes it possible for cloud and datacenter operators to upgrade their Fuel master node -- the server that controls the automation -- in place, without rebuilding or incurring cloud downtime in their deployed environments.

In addition to its upgrade and integration features, Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 also includes:
? The Murano application catalog, an OpenStack project in Stackforge which provides vending-machine style deployment of application workloads, combining PaaS and IaaS functionality within a single console.
? Point-and-click deployment of Sahara, the project that provides elastic deployment of Hadoop projects on an OpenStack cluster.
? Improved scalability for Ceilometer, the OpenStack monitoring and billing project, providing a highly-scalable data store for its telemetry data in a MongoDB repository.