Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 Focuses on "Day Two" Strengths

Mirantis, which continues to focus squarely on the OpenStack cloud platform, has announced the availability of a new version of its own OpenStack distribution. Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 enhances scalability and resilience, improves developer productivity and maximizes infrastructure flexibility, according to the company.

In addition to delivering what is billed as its most resilient OpenStack distribution to date, Mirantis is extending the support period of the distribution from two years to three. The latest release of Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 is available for download here.

Interestingly, Mirantis is steering away from just focusing on a game of feature leapfrog with other OpenStack distribution providers. “Early OpenStack releases were all about more features fast, as it was important to gain minimum feature parity to VMware, Microsoft and other cloud solution providers,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis CMO and co-founder. “Today the feature parity gap is largely closed with enterprises such as AT&T, Symantec, Walmart and many other Global 2000 enterprises running OpenStack at massive scale. The development priorities for OpenStack in both the community and at Mirantis have shifted from feature racing to stability at scale and day two operations.”

During the OpenStack Kilo release cycle, Mirantis is reported to have fixed more bugs in the upstream OpenStack community than any other vendor.  Its focus as a business remains deeply tied to OpenStack.

Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 is targeted to be VMware-friendly, featuring out-of-the box integration with VMware vCenter while offering choice in networking, including Juniper Contrail and VMware NSX fabrics. The company says more choices will follow.

New features in Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 let users:

- Upgrade from previous versions of Mirantis OpenStack with reduced downtime and a new rollback capability;
- Migrate instances from hosts marked for maintenance;
- Write richer Fuel deployment plugins that can define new node roles and reserve virtual IP addresses;
- Specify flexible underlay network topology in a simple manner with network templates;
- Tune control-plane architecture by moving services onto separate controller nodes;
- Deploy controllers on virtual machines for small footprint deployment;
- Build hybrid clouds with hierarchical multi-tenancy;
- Secure integration of control-plane of various IT systems with SSL endpoint encryption;
- Scale North-South traffic with Distributed Virtual Router (DVR);
- Integrate with container platforms, including Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes;
- Simplify bringing VMware environments to the cloud with new functions such as NSX-v and vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS);
- Deploy multiple Hadoop or Spark big data clusters in parallel through new Sahara features and gain additional flexibility via an updated plug-in for HDP v2.2. 

You can read more about the scalability of the new Mirantis distribution here: Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 Enhances Resilience at Scale