Canonical Releases Ubuntu Server 14.10

Canonical has released Ubuntu 14.10 for cloud and servers, adding support for the latest cloud, hypervisor and container technology in a bid to make it easier for businesses to deploy and manage complex deployments.

The British-based Linux distributor claims the new  features will allow for the rapid and reliable creation of scale-out environments, such as such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Big Data applications.

New additions include support for support for CloudFoundry, Hadoop with Hive and Pig Latin, Elasticssearch with Kibana, NoSQL and Aprak and Storm analytics. Canonical also promises the “fastest, more secure hypervisors” with support for LXC and Docker containers.

The release allows any user to spin off containers, something which it is claimed will provide higher security, privilege separation and greater system robustness

Ubuntu 14.10 server and cloud

For bare metal, Ubuntu 14.10 provides a consistent operating system experience across ARM, x86 and POWER8 architectures with Ubuntu being the first commercially supporter enterprise platform for AM64 computing and the next generation of POWER8 servers.

Disk acceleration brings low SSD latencies to large rotating disks and there is additional support for Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS), which turns any cluster of physical machines into a scale-put platform for bare metal workloads like Hadoop, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.

Indeed, 80 percent of large scale OpenStack deployments are currently operating on Ubuntu, and 14.10 builds on the recent release of OpenStack Juno with more granular policy controls for object storage, better network traffic optimisation and support for Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) for telecoms. IPv6 is supported in OpenStack, Juju and MaaS, in what Canoncial describes as an industry first.

Juju, Ubuntu’s service orchestration tool, has a revamped GUI which aims to simplify the scaling of large scale deployments, such as OpenStack, on public and private clouds or on bare metal. The addition of a machine level view makes it easier to manage workloads, while at a service level, users can take advantage of drag and drop placement.

This view shows exactly where services are deployed, making it easier to manage cloud environments and sort out any problems. Container compatibility within Juju allows for higher density workloads, while the platform now unifies the management of Windows processes alongside Linux.

The new version is available immediately as a free download alongside Ubuntu 14.10 for desktop, which adds a number of new usability features as well as support for the latest processors and graphics chips.

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