Networking specialist Cisco has announced the release of its own distribution of the open source OpenStack cloud management platform. The Cisco Edition of OpenStack is designed for automated deployment, high availability and monitoring. Cisco is one of the contributors to OpenStack's Quantum virtual networking component and the company has included its own Quantum Plugin; this works with Open vSwitch and Cisco Nexus subplugins, and offers L2 VLAN segmentation.

In addition to all of the core OpenStack services of the Essex and Folsom releases, the company's offering includes installation scripts as well as other open source components which its developers say should make it easier to install and run on production systems. Cisco-specific add-ons in this edition of OpenStack include the use of the open source Puppet configuration management tool for automating the deployment of services, and a compute monitoring stack consisting of Nagios, Collectd and Graphite, as well as high-availability support through the ha-proxy, kickstartd and galera components.

According to Cisco's Kyle Mestery, the current Cisco Edition of OpenStack has been tested under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the company's Nexus family of switches and UCS C Series servers. Mestery goes on to say that users "do not need to run the Cisco Edition of OpenStack on Cisco hardware, but it is validated on this hardware configuration".

More details, including installation instructions and documentation, can be found on the OpenStack at Cisco web site and on the Cisco OpenStack wiki page. The Cisco Edition of OpenStack is available to download from the company's FTP site. Cisco developers will talk about the company's future plans with OpenStack as well as its work on the Cisco Edition at the OpenStack Summit, currently taking place in San Diego.

See also:

Rackspace hands OpenStack over to independent foundation, a report from The H.

(crve)