Please go to https://help.landscape.canonical.com/AccessGroups for an overview and a few examples of this new feature, and let us know if you have any questions.

This version includes new features such as Eucalyptus cloud management and package activities sceduling as well as some polishing. Read on for details.

New features

In Landscape we always work at the same time in new features as well as in improving existing ones. Here are the new features for this release:

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Not only can Landscape interact with Amazon’s EC2 service, you can now use Landscape to handle instances in your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, based on Eucalyptus. All the features that work with EC2 also work with UEC, such as instance start/stop, Elastic Block Storage and others. All you need to do is provide the URL to the UEC endpoint and the cloud credentials:

UEC being defined

Scheduling

In this development cycle we started implementing scheduling in Landscape. For now, it’s only available for package activities and reboot and shutdown of computers, but expect this to be improved in the next few minor releases:

Scheduling a package activity

Access Groups

Access Groups allow us to restrict the computers to which selected administrators will have access to. Administrators that belong to an access group can only manage the machines in the same access group.

For example, if we had an access group called “devel”, administrators belonging to this group would only be able to manage the machines that also belonged to the “devel” group.

We want to make some last minute improvements to this feature, so it will only be available next week on November 2nd, 2009, but here is a sneak preview:

Preview of access groups

Ajax

It started small, with just a few icons showing the status of the EC2 instances in the computer page, but now we have Ajax all over the place in the user interface. This improves the user experience and makes Landscape faster and more robust.

Improvements

Landscape is always evolving, and we like to take care of existing features as well as introduce new ones. This time we paid considerable attention to packaging.

Package search

The package search page, which is central to all package activities, now uses a better search algorithm. Exact and more prominent matches are displayed first, and we got rid of the limitation of three characters at a minimum for a filter:

Improved search

Packaging User Interface

This has been in place already, but we would like to highlight it again. The new package interface can now handle upgrades, downgrades, new installations and removals all at the same time, in one place. Not only that, it also handles different versions of each package per computer and groups them all under the package name.

For example, before, when searching for a package called “postfix” among five different Ubuntu distributions, we would get one result for each version of “postfix”. Now it’s all grouped together under the “postfix” name, making the page much simpler to work with:

Dealing with four different versions of a package at the same time

Now a task like “install postfix on these four different Ubuntu machines” suddenly became much simpler: instead of 4 clicks (one for each version), it’s just one click away.

This time we added a few LDAP related Custom Graphs sample scripts. Check them out at https://help.landscape.canonical.com/CustomGraphs/Examples

Please visit https://help.landscape.canonical.com. This wiki is being constantly updated and we hope it will be useful to existing and new users. At some point in the future we will add direct links to some specific sections from within Landscape itself.

A note for Firefox-3.5 and Google Chrome users: the certificate the wiki site presents is a wildcard certificate for *.canonical.com, which, in those browsers, doesn’t match help.landscape.canonical.com. That’s why you will get a security warning.

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

]]> http://blog.landscape.canonical.com/2009/08/04/landscape-dedicated-server-edition/feed/ 2 http://blog.landscape.canonical.com/2009/07/27/offline-august-24th-1800-utc-1900-utc/ http://blog.landscape.canonical.com/2009/07/27/offline-august-24th-1800-utc-1900-utc/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:55:32 +0000 mthaddon http://blog.landscape.canonical.com/?p=239

Cloud Computing: EC2 Support

Landscape 1.3 introduces support for Amazon’s EC2 service. Administrators can now start and stop EC2 Ubuntu instances from within Landscape itself. As part of the integration we offer, these instances will be automatically registered with Landscape so they can be managed right away.

An EC2 cloud in Landscape is basically a Amazon EC2 region (endpoint) associated with an Amazon account. So, one admin can usually register as many clouds as there are regions:

Instances can be started one at a time, or several at once:

Here are our features:

• automatic registration of EC2 instances: launch an instance and start managing it right away in Landscape;

• computer history preserved across instance termination: if it was stopped and started from within Landscape, it will be associated with the same computer

• unified view of instances: it doesn’t matter if one instance is in the US cloud and the other one in Europe. Landscape provides the administrator with an unified view allowing them to be managed together as usual

This is just the beginning: now that the feature is in place, we have many plans for it in the next development cycle. Stay tuned!

Custom Graphs

One of the frequent comments we get about Landscape is that there are too few graphs available to monitor aspects of managed machines. That’s somewhat true: we had to choose a few to start with.

But what other graphs should we add? Many suggestions have popped up: network bandwidth, database performance, web hits, etc. There is no way we could keep everyone happy. Or is there?

We believe Landscape 1.3 brings you what you asked for in the graphs area: customization. Instead of having to choose which new graphs to add, we went ahead and decided you should be able to plot whatever you want in Landscape. This is what we call Custom Graphs.

With Custom Graphs, all the administrator needs to do is write a script that will output a number:

Landscape takes care of periodically running this script on the machines you select and plots the results for you:

Note: the custom graphs feature needs a newer landscape-client package which is currently only available for Ubuntu 9.04 “jaunty” and EC2 instances deployed via Landscape. Client updates for the other Ubuntu distributions will be released shortly.

Knowledge Base

For quite some time now our technical support staff has been writing articles to help our customers through many tasks. These articles are references on to how to solve particular problems and are used all the time.

We decided to make them available to all Landscape customers and this is what we call the Knowledge Base.

There are hundreds of articles available covering dozens of topics:

And it’s searchable, of course:

This is all available to Landscape users, and new articles are being written all the time. Enjoy!

Other Changes and Improvements

During a development cycle we don’t work only on major new features, but also improve existing ones and fix existing bugs. Here are some of the things we also worked on during this cycle:

• alerts: new offline computer alert, tiggered whenever a managed machine stops contacting the Landscape server

• Launchpad Authentication: Landscape authentication is now integrated with Launchpad

• new theme for the Landscape web interface

• progress bar for activities, to give the administrator an idea about how the activity is progressing

New Release Cycle

Starting now, Landscape will undergo a new release cycle. Instead of having new deployments every 2 weeks, new versions will now be released every 4 weeks instead. This will help us in the planning and deployment of new features.

Thanks to all who sent feedback, comments, suggestions and complaints to the Landscape Team!