In December 2009 Novell announced a new upcoming product part of the PlateSpin portfolio: codename Atlantic.
The company officially previewed it in May, as Cloud Manager: a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
Cloud Manager 1.0 has been released today and it has most of the features expected in this class of solutions:
- Self-service provisioning portal
- Content catalog (virtual machines and templates library)
- Resource pooling
- Role-based user access (RBAC)
- Multi-tenancy (through VLAN managemenet)
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs) enforcement
- Resource and SLAs metering & billing
- Integration with Novell Sentinel (for event correlation and management) and Novell Operations Center (for business service management)
Novell has also published an interesting comparison with other products, despite most of them are not billed as cloud management solutions:
The most interesting thing anyway is the support for 3rd party hypervisors: VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 and of course the Xen version embedded in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
It’s unclear why Novell didn’t extend Cloud Manager support to Citrix XenServer despite its announced strategy to bet on heterogenous hypervisors environments. Hopefully this has nothing to do with the recent agreement with VMware.
The product also supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008, SLES 9 and 10, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5 as guest operating systems, all of them in 32 and 64bit editions.