In With no licence fees and a focus on cloud features from primary sponsor, Canonical, Ubuntu has flourished in the cloud. Ubuntu has become a popular guest operating system on Amazon EC2 and other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) options, and the reference OS of choice for OpenStack and Cloud Foundry projects. While the Linux-based OS has been closely associated with the desktop, the projects server variant has grown more prominent in recent years, particularly in the context of cloud computing.
Based on my tests of Ubuntu Server 11.10, the projects cloud attractiveness shows no sign of abating. The new version, which shipped alongside its desktop-oriented sibling two weeks ago, is packed with tools for building, orchestrating and running on clouds private and public.
Version 11.10, also known as Oneiric Ocelot, is one of the projects fast-moving, short support-term releases. It includes more than a few rough edges in its new features, which I hope to see smoothed out for the next Long Term Support (LTS) edition of Ubuntu set to arrive in the spring.
In particular, what I found lacking was the documentation for 11.10s key new features, such as deploying OpenStack private clouds. For now, most Ubuntu private cloud documentation refers to the now-deprecated Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud feature based on Eucalyptus open-source EC2 workalike.
Having said this, the Ubuntu Server 11.10 has me looking forward to springs LTS version and I have been impressed enough with the current state of its management tools to keep an example of it running in our lab, to help with server and middleware installs for our tests. For production purposes, though, I recommend sticking with the previous LTS edition of Ubuntu Server, version 10.04.
Ubuntu Server 11.10 is available for free download from >tinyurl.com/3qgz77a and deploying OpenStack private clouds.
Orchestra brings together a few pre-existing open-source projects chiefly the Cobbler installation and Nagios monitoring servers to provide an automated way of deploying Ubuntu servers on bare metal or VMs. Ubuntu wraps these components into a single install command. I was able to quickly bring up an Orchestra server and install a managed Ubuntu instance via PXE boot.
Next, I turned my Orchestra server toward a pairing with a second new system deployment feature in Ubuntu Server Juju, a facility aimed at streamlining the process of deploying multi-component workloads. For instance, a WordPress blogging instance consists of database and web server components. Juju enables administrators to store the deployment steps for particular components for fast, consistent re-use in recipes called Charms.
The process for deploying services with Juju calls to mind the procedures for using a platform-as-a-service. Deploying WordPress, for instance, involves deploying database and WordPress application components and adding a relation between them.
I set up Juju environments for Amazon EC2 and for the Orchestra server Id set up. The EC2 process is better-documented (and simpler overall, as Amazon handles the VM provisioning parts of the process). However, after spending a few hours debugging my Orchestra-juju installation, I was able to deploy services on that foundation as well.
As it stands now, Juju is a fairly server-hungry affair. A simple WordPress installation requires three servers: one for the MySQL database, another for the Web server and a third for controlling the juju environment. Work is under way to use juju alongside the Linux Containers (LXC) functionality built into the Ubuntu Server. LXC, which is similar to the Solaris Containers feature, provides a way to divvy up a single VM or physical machine among OS instances that are lighter-weight than a full VM.
Also on the cloud computing track, I tested the Ubuntu Servers OpenStack private cloud functionality in the lab by installing a single-node OpenStack deployment. The install went smoothly, although not quite as smoothly as during my OpenStack tests with the purpose-built StackOps distribution earlier this year. I missed StackOps configuration helper, particularly when setting up the networking for my private cloud.
In my search for documentation for OpenStack on the Ubuntu Server, I noticed references both to installing OpenStack via Juju and via Orchestra. In addition to the fuller documentation, I hope to see a simpler OpenStack installation option. Ubuntus earlier Eucalyptus-based effort benefitted from an install disk menu option for spinning up a new cloud. It would be great to see a similar option for OpenStack.
The most mature element of the Ubuntu Server cloud computing feature list involves the products suitability as a guest OS for cloud or virtual environments. For Amazon EC2 users, theres a handy AMI locator for finding Ubuntu images in the version and regional zone one desires, and the cloud images available at >http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/ work well within most virtualisation platforms.
The Ubuntu Server is also the reference OS for VMwares Cloud Foundry project, and the client packages required for using Cloud Foundry are now available in the 11.10 repositories. The server packages for Cloud Foundry havent yet made their way into the releases official repositories, but they are available in a Personal Package Archive at >https://launchpad.net/~cloud foundry.
Jason Brooks is Labs Editor in Chief, eWeek.
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