OpenStack Ussuri available on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS

Canonical announced the general availability of OpenStack Ussuri on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The most notable enhancements of today’s OpenStack upstream release are stabilization efforts around the Open Virtual Networking (OVN) driver and the Masakari project which allow organisations to run highly available workloads on the top of an open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform. Full commercial support for OpenStack Ussuri in Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack distribution will come with the OpenStack Charms 20.05 release on May 20th. 

“It’s great to see members of the open infrastructure community bringing the features and capabilities of new releases to their users so quickly,” said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. “Thanks to the hard work of the upstream community, upgrades are faster and easier than ever before and the ecosystem is making the most of these capabilities in their product roadmaps. The OpenStack Ussuri release brings an unprecedented level of stability and performance for public and private clouds that need to deliver VMs, containers and bare metal instances. The ongoing contributions of our community make it possible for vendors and service providers like Canonical to keep making OpenStack a great choice for users across industries and use cases in almost every country around the world.”

The latest upstream changes around the OVN driver have opened doors to stabilizing it as the future default driver. This is due to the OVN driver being merged into the Neutron repository and becoming one of the in-tree Neutron modular layer 2 (ML2) drivers. Compared to the traditional Open vSwitch (OVS) driver, OVN provides support for virtual network abstraction and better segregation of the control from the data plane, resulting in a fully functional open source SDN solution.

Other important enhancements are the stabilization efforts around the Masakari project. Masakari provides high availability (HA) for workloads running on top of OpenStack by automatically recovering failed instances. This results in improved resiliency and allows tenants to meet their availability goals when deploying workloads without a need to struggle with complex underlying technologies, such as Corosync and Pacemaker.

Committed to maintaining OpenStack and Ubuntu release cycles in sync, Canonical will support OpenStack Ussuri on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS until 2025. An additional five years of security updates are available for enterprise customers as part of Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription. On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, OpenStack Ussuri will be supported until 2023, providing customers with a remaining three years of support until they upgrade the underlying operating system.

“OpenStack Ussuri on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS brings five years of commercial support and ten years of security updates out of the box, making it an ideal candidate for production OpenStack deployments while introducing major improvements to projects such as OVN and Masakari,” said Tytus Kurek, Product Manager at Canonical. “Canonical is delighted to continue contributing to OpenStack and supporting enterprise customers in partnership with leading global system integrators.”

Openstack Charms 20.05 features

In addition to the improvements introduced in the upstream Ussuri release, Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack distribution brings additional features with the 20.05 release. 

A stable release of OVN and Masakari charms

With the stable release of OVN and Masakari charms, Charmed OpenStack users will be able to automate the deployment of these components and integrate them with other OpenStack services. These charms will be fully supported by Canonical under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription.

New database backend – MySQL InnoDB Cluster 8.0

MySQL InnoDB Cluster 8.0 becomes the new default database backend for Charmed OpenStack providing easier recovery from database failures, resulting in improved cloud stability. Contrary to Galera Cluster, which was the default backend in previous releases of OpenStack Charms, MySQL InnoDB Cluster 8.0 performs data synchronization rather than data replication. Existing customers will be able to migrate to the new backend by following the migration procedure that will be available on the OpenStack Charms 20.05 release notes.

Support for standalone Ceph clusters through iSCSI gateway

Committed to supporting standalone Ceph clusters, this release of OpenStack Charms introduces support for Ceph iSCSI gateway. As a result, VMware clusters can consume block storage resources provided by Charmed Ceph, while benefiting from scalability, resiliency and data durability provided by software-defined storage. Ceph iSCSI gateway is a Ceph module that allows exporting Ceph RADOS Block Device (RBD) images as SCSI disks. Those can be later consumed as highly available iSCSI targets by clients using the iSCSI protocol over a TCP/IP network.

Ubuntu series upgrades parallelization

Upgrades of the underlying Ubuntu operating system can now be parallelized when performing an upgrade of Charmed OpenStack. This results with even easier and faster upgrades when using OpenStack Charms to deploy and operate the cloud.

Openstack Ussuri upstream features

The following section briefly describes the most notable features, across the infrastructure and tenant space, introduced to core OpenStack projects in the upstream Ussuri release:

• Cinder:
  • The ability to set minimum and maximum sizes for volume types.
  • Support for Glance multi-store and image data colocation.
  • New backend drivers.
• Glance:
  • Enhancements in multiple stores support.
  • New plugin to decompress the image when importing.
  • Re-introducing S3 driver.
• Keystone:
  • The better user experience when using federated authentication methods.
  • Federated users can now be created directly in Keystone.
  • An ‘immutable’ option set for the admin role when bootstrapping Keystone.
• Neutron:
  • OVN becomes one of the in-tree Neutron ML2 drivers.
  • Role-based access control (RBAC) for address scopes and address pools.
  • Support for stateless security groups.
• Nova:
  • Support for cold migration and resizing server between Nova cells.
  • Pre-caching Glance images to Nova compute hosts.
  • Enhancement to instances migration in environments with limited bandwidth.

To try Charmed OpenStack, visit their website.