Mirantis has upped the stability ante with the release of Mirantis OpenStack 8.0. The newest distribution, based on OpenStack Liberty, also includes support for adding both bare metal and Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts to an OpenStack cluster.The distribution currently has more than 26,000 users.

Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 is the first release to include the OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning project, Ironic. “Ironic enables your developers to provision a bare metal server with an API call or a click of a button, just like a VM. Up until the OpenStack Liberty release, we haven’t felt that Ironic was hardened enough to be put into production, but now it is, and we’ve integrated Fuel and Ironic so that Ironic can be deployed with the same simplicity as other OpenStack services,” Amar Kapadia wrote in his blog announcing the release.

The 8.0 release also focuses on flexibility and ease of operations. In addition to support for KVM on Ubuntu, RHEL7 KVM, XenServer and VMware vCenter, the latest version of OpenStack Fuel includes visual indicators making it easier for users and administrators to know which of the 170+ plugins available can be deployed concurrently.

Mirantis spends the time between the community release of OpenStack and its own release “hardening” the code, contributing bug fixes back to trunk. Mirantis was the #1 bug fixer in Liberty, with over 1,100 bugs fixed and an additional 300 or so bugs fixed in Mirantis OpenStack 8.0.

The company focuses on its position as a “pure play” distribution; rather than including additional components such as SDN or a particular hypervisor or Linux distribution, Mirantis OpenStack includes the pieces necessary to make OpenStack run, enabling the user to choose which additional software to include, with the goal of making the Mirantis OpenStack distribution a “no vendor lock-in” proposition.