Suse unveils OpenStack-driven cloud appliance

Linux developer Suse has released an alpha version of a cloud building block based on the OpenStack platform and its own Suse Linux Enterprise Server, aimed at making it easier for customers to get up and running with an open source cloud infrastructure.

Suse Cloud Powered by OpenStack is available to download now, but comes with a warning that this is the first public preview and as such is still an early development snapshot with a few rough edges.

"We wanted to show customers that enterprise-quality open-source cloud infrastructure is not way off in the future, but is a tangible part of our roadmap, and here is a version you can test today" said Kerry Kim, senior director for solution marketing at Suse.

The firm said it intends to do for the cloud what it previously did for Linux - take an open-source project and build it into a complete, enterprise-ready platform.

Available to download for free from the Suse Gallery, an online resource of Linux-based software appliances, this initial release offers a glimpse into how quick and easy it can be to build, deploy and manage private and public cloud infrastructures, according to Suse.

it is designed to install on a single, physical server as a test deployment, so customers can try out managing workloads on an OpenStack cloud.

The package is essentially a self-contained software appliance based on the latest OpenStack release, Diablo, running on top of Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1.

Announced last month, the Diablo release of OpenStack adds a self-service Dashboard and Identity Service to the existing Compute and Image Service modules.

This test build is basically the OpenStack code packaged to run on Suse, Kim said, but the final release will be hardened and integrated with Suse Manager and the Suse Studio image builder.

Suse said that its cloud infrastructure solution will be operating system neutral and hypervisor agnostic, coming with built-in support for the Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisors as standard.

This early build is based on KVM, but in the long term Suse expects to support VMware's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Kim said the final code is still 9 to 12 months away, and that Suse is targeting the Essex release of OpenStack for this.