Every cloud has an Aubergine lining...

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly pervasive and important in the world today. Cloud computing is used in datacenters all over for resource utilization, hosting, storage, providing media content, on-demand computing power and many other applications. Competition is growing at a rapid pace in this new infrastructure race with public cloud space available from Google, Amazon, Canonical, Apple and others. For this and other reasons, we need to be sure that Ubuntu functions well in the cloud as both a host and guest OS.

From a hardware certification point of view, we need to ensure that Ubuntu can function properly as a Virtual Machine on popular virtualization products: VMWare, XenServer and KVM. This means that we need to come up with a plan for extending infrastructure, tools and processes to allow for dedicated host machines for each of the respective virtualization products. However, we also need to keep this framed within the boundaries of Hardware Certification testing, not Software QA testing which is currently handled very well by the Ubuntu Server team and the Platform QA Team.

To get this done, several things need to occur. First, we need to beef up the server testing, this means adding new tests to the server test suite if necessary. Infrastructure needs to be improved to provide the means to do multi-network device testing. This will most likely mean some significant expense in purchasing hardware and will also rely on assistance from IS in getting that infrastructure in place where applicable. Additionally, possible test development time and debugging time. We need dedicated hardware to serve as XenServer hosts (VMWare already exists, but we may wish to update to a newer version). We need automated means for doing SRU testing on VMs and the means to certify Ubuntu as a Virtual Machine on both VMWare (mostly existing already) and XenServer. Finally, we should start also testing KVM. This could mean a third dedicated server to run the current LTS and host KVM vms for cert purposes.