Canonical releases Ubuntu 13.10 

“Ubuntu 13.10 delivers the latest and best version of OpenStack, and is the fastest, most flexible platform for scale-out computing,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder, Ubuntu, and VP Products, Canonical. “Ubuntu is typically used in very large scale deployments. In this release we’ve tuned the cloud deployment experience for very small clusters as well, to support dev-and-test environments.”

Juju, Canonical’s service orchestration tool, can deploy an entire software environment or service as a bundle from the Juju GUI, reducing complexity and allowing administrators to share complex workloads. Additionally, 13.10 introduces Juju management of LXC containers, allowing multiple services to run on the same machine.

ESXi users can interoperate with OpenStack, thanks to integration between OpenStack and VMware.

“The ability to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack alongside ESXi with orchestration that spans both properties is extremely valuable, bringing OpenStack right to the centre of common enterprise virtualization practice,” Shuttleworth said.

Version 13.10’s installer enables rapid provisioning of thousands of nodes, and the Ubuntu LXC update provides rapid and efficient cloning of containers.

Version 13.10 also includes Havana, the latest version of OpenStack, and provides tools such as Ceilometer for metering and monitoring, and Heat for auto-scaling.