Introducing Eucalyptus 2.0

Eucalyptus 2.0 is an open source Linux-based software architecture that implements scalable, efficiency-enhancing private and hybrid clouds within an organization's IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This means that users can provision their own collections of resources (hardware, storage, and network) via Eucalyptus’ self-service interface on an as-needed basis. A Eucalyptus cloud is deployed across an enterprise’s “on-premise” data center and is accessed by users over enterprise intranet. Thus, with a Eucalyptus private cloud, sensitive data remains secure from external intrusion behind the enterprise firewall.

Eucalyptus was designed from the ground up to be easy to install and as non-intrusive as possible. The software framework is highly modular, with industry-standard, language-agnostic communication. Eucalyptus is also unique by providing a virtual network overlay that both isolates network traffic of different users and allows two or more clusters to appear to belong to the same Local Area Network (LAN). Eucalyptus also interoperates seamlessly with Amazon’s EC2 and S3 public cloud services and thus offers the enterprise a hybrid cloud capability.

Initially developed to support the high performance computing (HPC) research of Professor Rich Wolski’s research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Eucalyptus is engineered based upon design principles that ensure compatibility with existing Linux-based data center installations. Eucalyptus can be deployed without modification on all major Linux OS distributions, including Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, openSUSE, and Debian. Ubuntu distributions now include the Eucalyptus software core as the key component of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

Who Should Read this Documentation?

This documentation is for Eucalyptus administrators who wish to deploy and manage the Eucalyptus cloud platform; and for users who wish to run and manage instances of Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) within a Eucalyptus cloud.

What’s in this documentation?

This online documentation contains instructions for administrators and users of Eucalyptus 2.0 open core software. While user-oriented instructions contained herein apply generally to all client tools capable of interacting with Eucalyptus, the primary focus is on the use of Euca2ools (Eucalyptus command line tools).

Contacting Eucalyptus

Please send any questions, corrections, comments, or suggestions for Eucalyptus documentation to documentation@eucalyptus.com.