Windows support in Ubuntu Juju, MaaS and OpenStack

We’re very pleased to announce a new partnership between Cloudbase Solutions and Canonical for bringing Windows support in Juju and Maas.

Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth showed a great demo of OpenStack integration with Hyper-V along with Active Directory, SQL Server and SharePoint Juju charms during the OpenStack summit keynote in Atlanta, providing a clear idea of the huge potential of this partnership. Thanks to this joint effort it will be soon possible to orchestrate Windows based deployments at any scale in an amazing way.

Juju provides it’s magic via charms, a very innovative way of defining deployments and relationships between components. For example the following screenshot of the Juju user interface clearly shows how easy it is to create a SharePoint server deployment by simply creating a relationship with an Active Directory controller and a SQL Server instance:

 

We already have complete Juju charms for:

• Active Directory
• IIS
• SQL Server
• Exchange
• SharePoint
• Lync
• Hyper-V OpenStack Compute

And a lot more to come!

Fault tolerance and scalability are a top priority for us, so our charms will support load balancing, clustering, SQL Server mirroring and other HA solutions.

All our charms support both bare metal and OpenStack virtualized deployments on any OpenStack hypervisor, including KVM, Hyper-V, vSphere / ESXi and more.

Here’s a snapshot showing how the SharePoint deployment pictured above translates in OpenStack virtual instances (click on the image to see the details):

 
 

 
We also introduced Windows bare metal deployment in MaaS, starting with Windows Server 2008 and up to Windows Server 2012 R2, including Hyper-V Server, along with all supported workstation operating systems, where Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 provide great value for VDI scenarios.

This is just the beginning, we’re planning to include mixed deployments with both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS) and way more, defining a whole new way to orchestrate the enterprise IT at any level!