Canonical Releases Landscape 1.5

[celldweller1591]

Ubuntu has taken the Linux world by storm on the desktop, but, for the enterprise market, it is still an up-and-comer. The open-source operating system is evolving to meet the requirements of this market as well and has proven especially popular for cloud applications. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud version is an interesting option for those looking to deploy an Amazon EC2-compatible private cloud. Now, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has released an updated version of its Landscape management tool for enterprises.

"Landscape 1.5 adds great features that reflect the growing use of Landscape in enterprise deployments and delivers the capability to deploy and manage Ubuntu in large scale use and in the innovative realm of cloud computing," Ken Drachnik, Landscape manager, Canonical said in a statement. "Landscape 1.5 will see the new features that larger scale users of Ubuntu have been requesting, giving them the ability to easily deploy, scale and manage Ubuntu in an enterprise-class environment."

Landscape offers system admins tools for the management of multiple Ubuntu machines from the same place, eliminating the hassle of having to do it individually for each. Admins can manage and monitor all aspects of the operating system including package management. Landscape comes in two flavors, the first as a service offered by Canonical that hosts and manages the app itself. Companies also have the option of deploying Landscape locally if they so desire.

With the new Landscape 1.5, which comes on the trails of the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, system administrators can set up a profile for a machine dedicated to a certain task and then replicate it across all the machines that should be set up in the same way. This includes the list of packages that need to be present and various configuration options.
Landscape also enables admins to upgrade their Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) installs to the next regular Ubuntu version or to the next LTS release. Upgrading the entire software stack, especially in enterprise environments, is not always recommended, so Landscape 1.5 also allows admins to ‘pin’ certain packages to ensure that they don’t get upgraded. New in Landscape 1.5 is the Cloud Topology feature, which provides a visual representation of the physical machines in a cloud to help admins get a better perspective. Also new is the support for LDAP and AD single sign-on authentication to enable users to log in with their enterprise credentials. You can find out more about Landscape on Canonical’s dedicated page.