Fedora 16 is codenamed Verne, although the release has been dedicated to Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C language, who recently passed away. Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith, told InternetNews.com that Fedora 16 refines and adds a number of cloud computing and virtualization tools.
“The new Aeolus Conductor is a web-based platform for managing virtual machines either in your own private cloud or in the various public clouds that are out there,” Smith said. “It makes it very easy to get up and running with cloud computing no matter who you are doing cloud computing with, so you don’t get tied down to one particular vendor’s tools.”
Fedora 16 also includes the open source OpenStack cloud platform, which some industry pundits have seen as being a competitive technology to Fedora’s Red Hat sponsor. Smith noted that in the case of Fedora, OpenStack is not a competitor with Aeolus.
“Aeolous and Open Stack are not competitive at all,” Smith said. “The idea with OpenStack is to have a set of tools that help you build your own cloud, while Aeolus provides tools to help you manage virtual machine in an OpenStack cloud or an Amazon cloud or an IBM cloud. To say they are competitive with each other is an apples and oranges comparison.”
For virtual machine control, Fedora 16 also provides a new locking mechanism for virtual disks. According to Fedora’s feature specs, the new virtual machine lock manager provides protection against starting the same virtual machine twice, or adding the same disk to two different virtual machines.
“Locking is always a tricky thing, making sure the different things don’t step on each other,” Smith said. “In mission-critical systems you wouldn’t want the same disk image to be added to two different virtual machines, so you can understand why this might be important to have.”