Test-drive the OpenStack Autopilot with a virtual appliance

Canonical today published a virtual appliance to help organisations experience first-hand the easiest way to install and operate an OpenStack cloud. Canonical’s OpenStack Autopilot is a fully automated deployment and operations management tool for OpenStack, managing small or large clouds across multiple availability zones. The virtual appliance simulates a bare metal OpenStack install with the Autopilot using an existing VMware vSphere cluster.

“Evaluating OpenStack is complex and requires a rack of spare servers” said Mark Baker, product manager for OpenStack at Canonical. “Now you can evaluate the OpenStack Autopilot experience using your existing VMware cluster, requiring no dedicated physical servers.”

The Autopilot virtual appliance enables people with an existing vSphere cluster to evaluate the Autopilot and OpenStack itself, deploying an OpenStack cloud on top of their existing vSphere infrastructure. The resulting cloud uses virtual servers so is not intended to validate raw performance, but it enables the organisation to evaluate OpenStack cost-effectively. The intention is to make it easy for enterprises invested in VMware’s legacy virtualization products to experience modern, scale-out, OpenStack cloud technology in a familiar environment without having to allocate new hardware.

Ubuntu is the leading platform for OpenStack deployments, with 65% of the largest OpenStack clouds selecting Canonical’s operating system according to the latest OpenStack Foundation Survey.

“The OpenStack Autopilot demonstrates the maturity of Canonical’s OpenStack ecosystem, offering a range of software defined networking and software defined storage options” said Shawn Madden, Product Manager for Canonical’s Landscape Management Server which provides the OpenStack Autopilot. “The Autopilot appliance will demonstrate the superior scale and economics of OpenStack to enterprises evaluating open, scalable cloud architectures.”

To download the try the OpenStack Autopilot appliance for VMware visit ubuntu.com/download/cloud