OpenStack announces new release codenamed Cactus

OpenStack the free and open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution intially launched by RackSpace has released a new version of OpenStack codenamed Cactus. Cactus is the follow up of Bexar, which introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

OpenStack is currently developing two projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Storage. OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to large amounts of data.

For Compute, Cactus provides the following changes:

  • Support for LXC containers through libvirt and VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi 4.1 update 1
  • Live Migration support
  • New features added to XenServer support like network andfile injection, IPv6 support..
  • Huge effort to support as much of the OpenStack 1.1 API as possible
  • Multi-tenant account support added to the OpenStack API
  • The ability for Nova to start instances from VHDs
  • Support for volumes residingon Lefthand/HP SANs
  • Support for IPv6 in all network modes
  • Ability to access instances through a websocket enabled browser (like Google Chrome) using VNC Proxy

For Storage, Cactus provides the following changes:

  • Option to serve static website content
  • Content checksum validation during object GET actions
  • Refactored proxy server
  • Improved indexing of the SQLite databases