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. 
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