A major new feature in this release is its high availability (HA) capability. It is designed to allow no single point of failure –if a system crashes due to any reason, Eucalyptus 3 will immediately trigger a failover to a “hot spare” service that is running concurrently on a different physical machine. This information is then propagated internally to reflect the change while showing no signs of underlying failure to the external world.

“Implementing HA was the obvious next major evolution for Eucalyptus,” said Eucalyptus CEO Mårten Mickos in a blog post. “Originally, our project to develop HA was intended for a few customers who were asking for it early on. But as we dove deeper into the topic, it turned out that a majority of our users needed this feature.”

Eucalyptus 3 also features enhancements to its resource access controls (RAC), which allow admins to tune user group management, perform in-depth cost tracking, and benefit from detailed visibility of cloud usage throughout an enterprise. RAC features include implementation support for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM) API and new service-level management mechanisms. It can also automatically map identities from enterprise LDAP and Active Directory (AD) servers to Eucalyptus accounts, groups, and users. And it includes expanded account and resource reporting interfaces for integration with existing data center chargeback and billing systems.

Eucalyptus 3 also includes cloud storage resource and platform enhancements, such as: Boot from EBS, NetAPP and JBOD SAN drivers, and support for VMware 4.1, RHEL 6.0 and KVM.

The HA capabilities of Eucalyptus may be able to keep this open source option in a competitive position against other IaaS offerings. But, how much demand is out there? Does a HA mechanism make you consider implementing private cloud more than before? If you’ve implemented a private cloud, would you upgrade to Eucalyptus 3 because of this feature?

GroundWork CEO Peter Jackson explained that the monitoring tool should help data center admins who are wary of the cloud feel better.

“The insecurity that any IT decision-maker has today, with Cloud is that they are going to lose control, said Jackson. “We can assure them that they will not lose control.”

The monitoring tool can be used on Amazon EC2 cloud or in the traditional data center.

“We think supporting both use cases is important,” said Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management at GroundWork. “We don’t think it makes sense to have multiple configuration systems any more than it makes sense to have multiple monitoring systems.”

GroundWork is recruiting participants for the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud beta program. The monitoring program allows data center admins to correlate and visualize application availability and performance info simultaneously across the in-house datacenter, a Eucalyptus private cloud, and Amazon EC2. Interested parties must go through a screening process for acceptance into the program, and a participant-oriented webcast preview will be held on April 13.

The beta program offers:

• GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure
• Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments.
• The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud.
• Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program.

Beta participants will be able to:

• Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds
• Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud
• Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications
• Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments.