We’ve got two events next week you’ll want to put on your calendars.

On Tuesday and Wednesday (October 29th and 30th) we’ll be doing another RDO Test Day, where we’ll be putting the Havana release through its paces. We’d really appreciate a few hours of your time to help make sure that the new release is solid.

Then, on Thursday (October 31st), at 4pm GMT, Brent Eagles will giving a talk about more advanced networking techniques on OpenStack. You can sign up on the Google Hangout, and attend online.

Dan Radez will be presenting at three meetups in the US North East, November 19th, 20th, and 21st, on the topic “Getting Started with RDO”. If you’re in Pennsylvania, New York or Connecticut, please help us get the word out, and we’d love to have you show up there yourself if you can.

You can find more details at http://www.jaddog.org/2013/10/23/openstack-meetups-getting-started-with-rdo/

RDO congratulates the OpenStack Foundation on the release of OpenStack 2013.2, code named Havana, the latest version of the OpenStack cloud platform.

And, right on the heels of that, we’re pleased to announce RDO Havana, our packaging of OpenStack Havana for easy deployment on Red Hat derivative operating systems - RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux, and other RPM-based linux distributions. You can obtain and deploy RDO Havana immedately using the instructions at http://rdoproject.org/Quickstart

OpenStack Havana introduces new functionality, and numerous improvements to existing functionality, and was created by contributors from over 100 different companies, as well as numerous independent developers, making thousands of different changes since the Grizzly release in April. (See http://www.stackalytics.com/ if you’re into statistics.) We’re very proud to have been part of that, and we have a lot to be proud of.

Some of the most important changes in OpenStack Havana are:

• Heat - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Heat - is an orchestration service which provides a way to automate the deployment of infrastructure and applications on top of OpenStack services, using declarative templates. Heat completed the incubation process and graduated to be an integrated OpenStack project for Havana.

• Ceilometer - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ceilometer - provides monitoring and metering services for OpenStack, to collect and measure usage data which can then be consumed by a variety of other services. Ceilometer, like Heat, has been in incubation, and is now an integrated OpenStack project.

• Keystone - http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/ - the identity manager for OpenStack, is much more configurable in the new version. Of greatest interest is the addition of the ability to store authentication (credentials) and authorization information in separate back ends. For example, you can now tie login information to your corporate LDAP (or Active Directory) server, while having role and group management handled on the OpenStack SQL server. This makes OpenStack much easier to deploy into an existing organization, and less hassle to administer.

• Neutron - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron - formerly named Quantum, has a gorgeous new clickable interface in Horizon (the OpenStack dashboard) where you can visualize what your network configuration looks like, and modify portions of it in a quick and intuitive way.

And numerous other changes - thousands of them - make up this release. You can read the full release notes at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/Havana

Looking forward, we’re excited about what’s coming in future releases. And the best place to see what’s coming is to look at the projects that are in incubation. These include:

• Savanna: enables deployment of Hadoop clusters on top of OpenStack.
• Marconi: queuing and notification services.
• TripleO: operating OpenStack clouds running on top of OpenStack

and so many more. We’re closely watching these projects, and participating in many of them, so that we can help create that future. Because, while the RDO project is about packaging and distributing upstream OpenStack, most of the folks involved in RDO are also actively working on the next release of OpenStack, even as we are celebrating this release.

The fastest way to get up and running on the new release is via the Quickstart instructions, at http://rdoproject.org/Quickstart Then, check out our docs to find out more about how to launch a VM (http://rdoproject.org/Running_an_instance), configure your network (http://rdoproject.org/Neutron_with_OVS_and_VLANs) or deploy applications (http://rdoproject.org/Deploy_an_application_with_Heat). Ask your questions, and tell us how you’re using RDO, in the RDO forum (http://rdoproject.org/forum). Come talk with us at conferences, meetups and other events (http://rdoproject.org/Events). Come be part of our community.

Next week, many of the RDO community will be in Edinburgh, UK, for LinuxCon Europe. http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe There’s a lot of OpenStack content at the conference, and there’s also several co-located events that have a lot of cloud-related content:

• CloudOpen - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/cloudopen-europe
• KVM Forum - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kvm-forum
• Gluster Workshop - http://www.gluster.org/2013/10/gluster-workshop-in-edinburgh-at-linuxcon-europe/

And, of course, there’s also really cool events like the Automotive Linux Summit - http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/automotive-linux-summit-fall - where they have all sorts of sweet toys.

If you’re planning to be there, please drop by and say hi. Some of us will be at the OpenStack booth, and others at the KVM and Gluster events. In particular, if you’d like to talk about how you’re using OpenStack and RDO in your organization, I’d love to do some brief interviews for the RDO website.

See http://community.redhat.com/events/#LinuxCon%20Europe for some of the talks that will be given about RDO and related topics.

Hope to see you there!

Our friends at Mirantis will be presenting a webcast on October 29th, talking about what’s new in Havana. You can register at http://mirantis.sites.hubspot.com/whats-new-in-havana-openstack-release-technical-overview

Date: Tuesday, 29 October, 2013

Time: 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET / 7:00 pm CET

Key Topics:

• Easier management with new orchestration and scaling capabilities and even the option to suspend instances and reuse their resources
• Ability to choose VMWare and Hyper-V hypervisors
• Expanded storage capabilities, with support for global storage clusters and more options for managing block storage backends
• More flexibility through the ability to move and distribute applications and environments with Docker support
• Better control with new metering and monitoring capabilities
• More powerful networking with Load Balancing-, VPN-, and Firewall-as-a-Service right from the UI

(Via Pádraig Brady - see original mail thread at https://www.redhat.com/archives/rdo-list/2013-October/msg00046.html )

The full Havana RC1 package set is now available in the RDO repos, for both el6 distros and Fedora 19. Instructions to get started with these repos are at: http://rdoproject.org/QuickStartLatest

In this release we have:

openstack-swift-1.10.0-0.1.rc1
openstack-ceilometer-2013.2-0.12.rc1
openstack-keystone-2013.2-0.14.rc1
openstack-glance-2013.2-0.12.rc1
openstack-nova-2013.2-0.23.rc1
openstack-cinder-2013.2-0.11.rc1
python-django-horizon-2013.2-0.12.rc1
openstack-neutron-2013.2-0.12.rc1
openstack-heat-2013.2-0.9.rc1

also these set of client packages:

python-ceilometerclient-1.0.3-1
python-cinderclient-1.0.6-1
python-glanceclient-0.10.0-1
python-heatclient-0.2.4-1
python-keystoneclient-0.3.2-6
python-neutronclient-2.3.1-1
python-novaclient-2.15.0-1
python-swiftclient-1.7.0-1
python-troveclient-0.1.4-3

Since these packages follow upstream development very closely, the best list of changes from the existing milestone releases that were already packaged in the RDO repos, can be seen at: https://launchpad.net/openstack/+milestone/havana-rc1

A couple of support package updates worth mentioning are:

python-oslo-config-1.2.0-0.5.a3 which now supports a more logical separation of distribution specific config and user specific config.

selinux-policy-3.7.19-216 which now supports the quantum -> neutron renaming performed within the Havana cycle.

Red Hat is proud to have been a sponsor of OpenStack India this year. Over 200 people attended the event. Here’s a writeup and some photos from the event: http://openstackindia.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/event-report-openstack-india-day-2013/

Greetings,

I wanted to announce that the RDO CI team has begun to publish our results to the community. The results of the CI system are available <a href= https://prod-rdojenkins.rhcloud.com/>here </a>. Over the next few weeks we will be pushing out our results of additional openstack configurations like multi-node installations. We are also working on improvements in the ability to gate changes based on the results of our testing. We are focused on improving the quality and experience of RDO for the community. Look for updates to the <a href=http://rdoproject.org/Continuous_Integration>Continuous Integration</a> page. Any comments or questions are always welcome.

Thank you.

RDO Jenkins: https://prod-rdojenkins.rhcloud.com/

We’re delighted to announce that we’ll be doing another presentation on OpenStack networking, at 12 Eastern (time in your timezone).

Brent Eagles (beagles in the forums and IRC) will be presenting the next step, to follow on from Dave’s presentation on basic networking. He’ll be covering topics such as GRE tunneling and VLANs, and other advanced topics that you’ll need to know. He’ll also have the assistance of other folks on the Red Hat OpenStack networking team, both for the presentation and for Q&A afterwards.

The event will be an online live streaming event, but will also be available as an archived YouTube video afterwards. The address of the streaming event will be posted here, and on the Google+ event page closer to the event, and if you indicate your attendance at the Google+ page, you’ll be notified of updates to the information.

The agenda for the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong is now live, at http://openstacksummitnovember2013.sched.org/

If you’re going to be in Hong Kong, please let us know, or drop by and see us at the Red Hat booth. We’d love to talk with you.