After being acquired by Citrix Systems in July for more than $200 million, Cloud.com’s CloudStack cloud management framework is being open-sourced. The software currently supports over 60-large scale production clouds, including those run by GoDaddy, GreenQloud, KT, Nokia, Tata Communications and Zynga. With the release, CloudStack has also added support for additional hypervisors and support for bare metal provisioning.
Cloud.com, which was launched in May 2010, gives companies their own private, EC-2 like infrastructure. However, the company admits that it often used its name (“Cloud.com”) interchangeably with the open source CloudStack project to much confusion. In actuality, Cloud.com had previously maintained two separate code bases – one for paying customers and one for open source users. As of last week, both code bases have been merged into one under the GPU GPL v3 license. The code can be downloaded from cloudstack.org.
In addition, with the launch of CloudStack 2.2.10 this week at the VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas, the framework now supports VMware’s newly launched ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and Oracle’s VM 2.X variants of the Xen hypervisor, to complement the range of VMware, KVM and Xen hypervisors it already supports. Support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V will arrive later this year. And as before with CloudStack, customers can mix and match multiple hypervisors, both proprietary and open source, and use them in a highly available cloud computing instance.
The other newly available feature is bare metal provisioning, which lets customers set up bare metal hosts that do not run hypervisor software. These can be managed using the CloudStack Management Server in the same cloud as virtual instances.
Cloud.com also says that it’s working to converge features from the IaaS cloud computing project OpenStack, which counts Citrix among its most significant contributors, to CloudStack. In the future, Citrix and CloudStack engineers will integrate OpenStack Storage (Swift) with CloudStack, and will work to allow the CloudStack Management server and Web interface the ability to manage OpenStack instances.
Comment