Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 is Now Available for Download

This past Friday March 7, 2014, we released Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 for download, including hardened packages for the OpenStack 2013.2.2 release, along with a set of fixes and improvements we think you’ll find useful. You can read up on the details of Mirantis OpenSack  in the release notes, but we wanted to highlight some key features and fixes in this version.

• The latest  OpenStack release
  As mentioned, the Mirantis OpenStack hardened packages support the latest stable OpenStack Havana maintenance 2013.2.2 release. Fuel 4.1 deploys this version of OpenStack on CentOS or Ubuntu. (It’s worth noting that we completed the release within less than 30 days of the February 13 release of the stable upstream 2013.2.2 release).

• Stop a deployment cleanly
  Whenever you're in deployment mode for something as complex as OpenStack, things can go wrong, and the easier it is to get back to a known good state, the faster you can iterate with adjustments and changes. To that end, we've added two much-requested features we think you'll find useful:

  • Stop Deployment: make a clean stop during deployment without waiting for the entire deployment to complete; any incompletely provisioned nodes are returned to their pre-deployment state, and you can continue where you left off

  • Reset Deployment: return all nodes in a completed deployment to their pre-provisioned state; that way, you can do a full "re-install” of an environment and still retain the majority of your previously-selected configuration parameters.

• NIC Bonding
  While most servers have multiple physical network interfaces, it’s not unusual to allocate each of them to a different channel -- one for storage, one for management, one for public, etc. The problem is that when you do that, you can’t get the full power of your available network interfaces to be more than what's linked to any one physical connection -- so even if you have four 1 gig connections, you don’t get 4 gig throughput. With NIC Bonding (also called “link aggregation”), which is now configurable through the Fuel UI, Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 you can easily aggregate the resources of all of your connections and split them one way or another -- or roll them all together.

• Better tenant isolation in the application catalog
  This release incorporates 0.4.1 of Murano, the  application catalog and data services lifecycle management addition for OpenStack. It now includes features such as per-tenant isolation, whereby modifications to service definitions can be limited to a single tenant. Floating IP auto-assignment, new in this Murano release, lets you assign a Floating IP to your application during the deployment, which allows a user to connect to any application built with Murano from an external network.

• Savanna with plugin for Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop (IDH)
  Savanna (which is being renamed ‘Sahara’) now features a plugin supporting the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop plugin; this plug-in enables features such as:

  • Installation and provisioning of Intel Hadoop Manager and Intel Hadoop

  • The ability to attach Cinder volumes to VMs with Intel Hadoop

  • Manual cluster scaling

• Production-grade Ceph for ephemeral volumes
  In Mirantis OpenStack 4.0, we made it possible for the Nova (Compute) service in Mirantis OpenStack to support VM instances backed by ephemeral volumes stored in Ceph. With Glance, Cinder, and Nova all supporting the Ceph RBD backend, OpenStack VM instances can take advantage of Ceph clustered storage capabilities throughout the  life cycle of each VM. Since ephemeral volumes can be created as copy-on-write clones of Glance images, then recovered from Compute node failures thanks to Ceph object replication, and then shared among Compute nodes, this feature also enables live migration of VMs.

So those are some of the highlights of this release. As always, we continue to add capability to the Fuel control pane, and since it’s open source, your comments, questions, and contributions are always welcome.

Altogether, we’re continuing to work hard to make Mirantis OpenStack the fastest, easiest, and most flexible way to deploy and manage OpenStack at scale and in prodution. We invite you to download Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 today to see for yourself.