We've been showing sneak previews of several new features in Studio at SUSECon a couple of weeks ago. I'm happy to announce today that they are now ready for public use!
Feature #1: New build format "SUSE Cloud / OpenStack / KVM"
The first feature is the new build format "SUSE Cloud / OpenStack / KVM". This outputs a compressed qcow2 file that is native to KVM. The built-in compression is so efficient that we no longer need to re-compress (gzip) the resulting image to reduce the download size. This means you can directly consume the image from Studio, without any uncompression step. It is available to all base systems (eg. openSUSE and SLE) and templates (eg. JeOS, Server, Desktop).
Studio supported KVM for years but only via VMWare's VMDK format, which KVM is able to boot directly. However, this format lacked some features and in cases where the target environment only supports qcow2, a slow image conversion is required. With the new native KVM qcow2 format, this additional step is eliminated. This is also the preferred format for SUSE Cloud and OpenStack, hence those are also in the format name.
Feature #2: SUSE Cloud support
The second feature is SUSE Cloud support, which is currently only available for SLE11 SP2. You'll find a new "SUSE Cloud" section in the Configuration -> Appliance tab. When enabled, the cloud-init package is installed and is triggered on first boot when running outside of Testdrive. This sets up the root keypair with that from SUSE Cloud or OpenStack when booting the image in those environments. For added security, it disables password based logins for the root account as well. Therefore, you must use the associated SSH keypair from SUSE Cloud / OpenStack to login.
This is the first blog post in a series of SUSE Studio and SUSE Cloud integration articles, so stay tuned for more details and examples.
[5 Oct 2012] Update: The second post in this series, "Importing images into SUSE Cloud / OpenStack" is out now.
[8 Oct 2012] Update: The third and last blog post in this series, "Automatic image imports with WebHooks" is out now.
