Canonical Blog

Next week (31 August through 3 September) VMorld 2009 kicks off in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. For the second year, Canonical has a booth to demonstrate Ubuntu’s virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.

Last year VMWorld 2008 was in sunny Las Vegas. We talked to thousands of people throughout the show, and only found a handful who hadn’t used Ubuntu – don’t worry we sent every one away with a free CD so they could put that right! It was a great show with lots of interest in Ubuntu following on from the 8.04 LTS release, and our virtualization solution.

We expect the 2009 show to be just as much fun. Ubuntu has been on the top of the VMWare charts as a base OS for many virtual machine images, so we hope that the new virtualization features coming in 9.10 will be well received. In 9.04 we previewed Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) our private or on-premises cloud. This gives anyone who has their own servers the ability to set-up a cloud similar to Amazon’s EC2.

We’ll be presenting a talk for enterprises on how cloud computing can help them at the Solution Exchange Theatre on Wednesday 2nd September at 11:50 am. Entitled “The Clear Path to a Cloudy Enterprise”, it will be given by John Pugh, one of Canonical’s Partner Managers. If you would like to hear about the future of cloud computing, how open source offers a real alternative, and how Ubuntu can be used in this scenario then this talk should be informative and fun.

If you are going to be at VMWorld then please come along to the Canonical booth (#2403) and say hello to us. We would love to talk to you about Ubuntu, how you’re using it, and how you can get more from it – see you
in San Francisco!

Today we are announcing the Landscape Dedicated Server Edition — a stand alone version of Landscape that users can install on-site giving them complete control of their Ubuntu environment. This is one of our most requested features so we modified the Hosted version of landscape, keeping all the management, auditing and monitoring features, packaging it as a software appliance you install on your systems. Now Landscape can operate locally so all your information transfers over your local network and all system configuration, policies and profiles are stored on your infrastructure.

New features available with the Dedicated Server and Hosted edition in the October release include:

• Manage your Cloud and physical systems in one console – including server, desktop and Amazon EC2 Cloud instances.

• Scheduled package updates – Now you can schedule package updates and machine restarts for maintenance windows or when network usage is low minimizing the impact to your users.

• Administrator Delegation – Group your systems to meet your needs then assign permissions to different administrators enforcing work rules and enhancing security.

To be the first to know about availability of the Landscape Server, get informed about upcoming Webinars and download the brochure.

Of course we will continue to offer the Hosted version of Landscape along side the Dedicated Server giving users a choice in how they want to manage their Ubuntu systems. All the new features mentioned above are planned to be available in October when we release the next major update of Landscape and Ubuntu Karmic Koala. The Landscape Dedicated Server is available for order now, but installation will not be available until late September / early October.

Click for detailed information on Landscape, Support and our Training products and services.

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager