In December 2020, Red Hat announced major changes to the roadmap of its CentOS distribution, including the early end of life of CentOS 8 in December 2021. Due to this sudden and unexpected change, new Linux distributions have been developed as possible alternatives to CentOS, which are binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8). One such distribution is Rocky Linux (named as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh).
Rocky Linux Support in CloudStack
Led by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project, Rocky Linux is a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with RHEL8. With its General Availability release in June, it will be a suitable replacement for CentOS 8 due to its binary compatibility and easy migration path.
In keeping with the CloudStack legacy of supporting popular OSes and hypervisors, support has been added for Rocky Linux. CloudStack can now be installed on Rocky Linux 8.4, which can also be used as a Management and Usage server, as well as a KVM hypervisor host. Additionally, there is no reason that CloudStack could not be installed and used on other EL8 binary-compatible versions such as RHEL 8, Oracle Linux 8, CentOS Stream, and Alma Linux 8. However, we have only tested and verified Rocky 8 explicitly.
openSUSE Support in CloudStack
Support has also been added for openSUSE Leap, an open-source community project with Linux-based distributions sponsored by SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH and other companies. OpenSUSE Leap is openSUSE’s regular release with guaranteed stability, and can be used as a Management and Usage Server as well as a KVM hypervisor host. Since openSUSE Leap is compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise, CloudStack could be installed and used on SUSE Linux Enterprise as well. However, only OpenSUSE Leap has been tested and verified for most features.
The addition of these Operating Systems to the plethora of those already supported in CloudStack expands its influence, ensuring that CloudStack is the prevalent turnkey solution in the ever-changing world of Cloud Infrastructure.
These new features will be available in the 2021 Q3/4 LTS release of CloudStack along with several other additions and improvements.
David is a cloud and Kubernetes enthusiast, a Software Engineer and an active committer to the CloudStack Project. In his career, he has worked at some of the biggest virtualization and networking companies – VMware, Cisco, General Electric – building infrastructure and developing cloud and on-premise applications. He is experienced in microservices, machine learning and cloud technologies. David is also a national level rugby player and enjoys trekking and long rides.
You can learn more about David and his background by reading his Meet The Team blog.
