Mirantis Launches OpenStack Icehouse Distribution

Mirantis has released the latest version of its OpenStack distribution to general availability. Version 5.0 is an OpenStack Icehouse-based distribution, but Mirantis has also added support for VMware vCenter.

Also integrated into the new release is Fuel, the open source deployment and management tool for OpenStack. Mirantis has integrated Fuel into the distro with "an intuitive, GUI-driven experience that lets them set up or change a fully functional OpenStack cloud in a matter of minutes." This also means indirect support for Docker, as Fuel uses Docker for making the control plane 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, in a prepared statement. "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."

Also added is support for VMware vCenter Server, providing customers of vCenter with the ability to deploy and control workloads that run directly on VMware vSphere within their vCenter clusters from Mirantis OpenStack. Mirantis is positioning it as an alternative to KVM and provides VMware resources transparently within the pool of compute resources assigned through the OpenStack Horizon console.

Mirantis focuses exclusively on OpenStack cloud solutions and has been building up its own OpenStack distribution to be a major player in the open source cloud market. The update to support the Icehouse release, as well as Fuel and vCenter, make Mirantis' OpenStack distribution even stronger.

Other new features included within Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 include:

• The Murano application catalog, an OpenStack project in StackForge that 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.