Eucalyptus 2.0 was just released yesterday; the latest version of the Eucalyptus open source cloud introduces several new features, including iSCSI support for EBS volumes, S3 versioning, virtio support for KVM hypervisors, and new administrator tools:

• High Scalability: Eucalyptus employs a software design in which scalability is achieved at two levels: front-end, transactional scalability and back-end, resource scalability. The new version of Eucalyptus provides increased back-end cluster scale improvements to support massive private and hybrid clouds.
• Support for iSCSI protocol for EBS volumes: Eucalyptus now supports Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol for EBS volumes, which can make overlaying a Eucalyptus cloud on top of existing IT infrastructure even easier. This feature gives Eucalyptus users the flexibility to situate the EBS controller machine anywhere on the cloud, including outside the broadcast domain of the cloud nodes.
• KVM virtio support: Eucalyptus 2.0 supports KVM virtio, an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Users now have the flexibility to choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel supported I/O devices via virtio for performance tuning.
• S3 versioning: Eucalyptus 2.0 extends its innate compatibility with AWS with support for S3 versioning. Now users can perform version control on the objects stored in Eucalyptus Walrus. Through a well-defined API, Eucalyptus users can retrieve specific versions of objects.

Also Eucalyptus introduced enhancements to its open.eucalyptus.com website to make submitting patches to the Eucalyptus open source code easier and more transparent. Seems like many of these came as the result of the latest controversy about eucalyptus and its open core model that resulted in the launch of the highly publicized OpenStack at OSCon. This demonstrates again (if it was needed) that it’s good to have several alternatives and this will only result in innovation and progress.

One of the great features of Amazon EC2 is the possibility to dynamically query and use instance specific metadata, or even custom data. This can be useful for various reasons, and the greatest advantage I’ve personally seen into this, is the possibility to allow the instance to have some information on how to configure itself when first booting (using chef or puppet, or some other configuration management tool).

The Amazon documentation explains how to get this information, basically just by using simple http get requests on the ip: 169.254.169.254, like for ex (for the metadata index):
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
or for the custom data:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

Eucalyptus supports this great feature (starting with v1.4), but we obviously need to target a different ip to retrieve this information (as the amazon ip has nothing to do with our internal cloud ). We need to use the cloud controller IP for the request and the port it is bound (by default 8773 if you have not changed it). This will look like this (you need to run it from inside the actual instance): Read the rest of this entry »