“What’s New in OpenStack Havana: A Technical Overview”

Thanks so much to everyone who attended our webinar on “What’s New in OpenStack Havana: A Technical Overview” on Tuesday, and thanks to my co-presenter, Oleg Gelbukh, and to Mirantis Engineer Damian Szeluga, who helped so much in putting this together.  In a few days we’ll post the answers to all of your Q&A’s–including those we didn’t get to–but in the meantime, here are the basics of what we covered:

• New options for storage, images, and hypervisors: New options mean increased flexibility for users who have mixed or legacy IT environments.

• Migration options:  New abilities to do live migration of instances to larger or smaller servers, or for Cinder volumes to new backends, mean increased agility and the ability to make sure your cloud is sized right; no more over-provisioning “just in case we need it later.”

• Better integration with VMware vCenter:  vCenter can now manage multiple clusters, as well as Cinder volumes, so enterprise customers of VMware have an easier time managing their resources.

• Re-architecting of the L2 and L3 networking layers for increased agility:  L2 and L3 code has been modularized, allowing for easier creation and mixing of new drivers from different vendors for heterogenous environments.

• Global clusters: With local read/writers and tiered storage, objects can now be stored all over the world for disaster recovery without losing the advantage of “local” performance.

• Better identity management:  Groups simplify management and have opened the door to more flexibility in configuring Keystone’s backend.

• New UI features:  New features in the OpenStack Dashboard make it possible to manage firewalls and VPNs, visualize the network, manage users, and perform tasks that were previously available only on the command line, leading to decreased administrator overhead, as more tasks can be handled directly by users.

If you missed it, don’t worry, you can still get the replay, including the video.

Now, here’s where I admit to a tiny bit of ulterior motive in this post. Part my job at Mirantis is to produce technical content that’s going to be useful for you, so I’d very much like to know: what do you want to know more about?  Are you confused about networking?  Not sure how new features in Keystone can help you?  Want more information about your particular driver?  (I’m working on that article explaining the difference between Cinder, Swift, and Glance; hopefully that’ll clear it up…)  Or on the flip side, maybe you have a topic you’d like to talk about; let us know that too.

Please leave us a comment and let us know what you’d like to hear about!