The Ubuntu server team intends to offer a set of new software packages related to cloud computing in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), due to be released in April 2009. Most notably:

OpenNebula

Provides a very convenient abstraction of computational ressources (both local (in your on data center) and remote (on Amazon’s EC2, for instance)).

Eucalyptus

Provides an EC2-like cloud, so that you can set up your very own local EC2).

I’m pleased to announce that as of a couple of days ago, the first of these, OpenNebula, is now available.

There are five packages in total, of which only two are going to be of general interest:

• opennebula

  This is the core of opennebula. It contains oned, mm_sched and
  everything else that you’d find in a regular OpenNebula installation.
  Additionally, it creates an ssh key pair for the oneadmin user, to
  ease in setting up connections to other nodes.

• opennebula-node

  As you may know if you’re a current OpenNebula user, OpenNebula doesn’t
  actually need any parts of OpenNebula installed on its nodes. All it
  needs is ssh access from the OpenNebula server and access to a hypervisor.
  Hence, this package installs the hypervisor packages (kvm and
  libvirt-bin) and prepares the oneadmin user.

If you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to shout, and also feel
free to report any bugs here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/opennebula/+filebug

A word of caution: Ubuntu 9.04 is still very much work in progress. Do
not use this in a production environment. If it breaks, you get to keep
both pieces.

This has been bugging me for a looong time, but for some reason I only just now pulled myself together and did something about it:

Back in Hardy, I changed Ubuntu’s version of virsh (the command line utility for libvirt) to connect to qemu:///system if you had access to that, and fall back to qemu:///session if you didn’t. This saves you the trouble of adding -c qemu:///system to your command line (or setting VIRSH_DEFAULT_URI appropriately) every time you wanted to do something useful with virsh. The upstream default was (and still is, IIRC) to connect to xen:///, but that’s not really appropriate for us since we prefer kvm.

virt-viewer, however, never got the same attention. It still defaults to xen:///. Or rather: it did until an hour or so ago: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+source/virt-viewer/0.0.3-6ubuntu3. Enjoy. Err… Make that https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+source/virt-viewer/0.0.3-6ubuntu4. Go me.