Today we are announcing the Landscape Dedicated Server Edition — a stand alone version of Landscape that users can install on-site giving them complete control of their Ubuntu environment. This is one of our most requested features so we modified the Hosted version of Landscape, keeping all the package management, auditing and monitoring features, packaging it as a software appliance you install on your systems. The key feature is:
Operates locally – all information transfers over your local network and all system configuration, policies and profiles are stored locally on your infrastructure.
New features available with the Dedicated Server and Hosted edition in the October release include:
Scheduled package updates – Now you can schedule package updates and machine restarts for maintenance windows or when network usage is low, minimizing the impact to your users.
Administrator Delegation – Group your systems to meet your needs then assign permissions to different administrators enforcing work rules and enhancing network security.
Manage your Cloud and physical systems in one console – including server, desktop and Amazon EC2 Cloud instances.
This has been in Beta testing for the past 3 months which has given us experience in installing and managing Landscape in a variety of enterprises, ISPs and a University. We’ve been working on the installation and operation procedures and updating the configuration files to give users additional control over how landscape works. And we have updated the GUI with AJAX so the interface is much more responsive when working with large numbers of systems. To keep things simple, we plan to ship this as an appliance that installs on one or two servers depending upon the number of clients you want to manage. Since this is an enterprise product, installation by Canonical is required. You can order it now, however we won’t be able to install it until early October.
Of course we will continue to offer the Hosted version of the Landscape Service along side the Data Center Server giving users a choice in how they want to manage their Ubuntu systems. All the new features mentioned above are planned to be available in October when we release the next major update of Landscape and Ubuntu.
To be the first to know about availability of the Landscape Server and to download the brochure, simply register your interest here: http://www.canonical.com/landscape-server
Get more information on Landscape here: http://www.canonical.com/landscape
What are the licensing terms?
Landscape is offered as a commercial service or server that you can install onsite – both are offered under commercial licenses. The client, however, is available under GPL at Launchpad.