Greetings to all,

We are pleased to announce the availability of the second release
candidate (RC) -- v1.5rc2 -- for Eucalyptus Version 1.5, the next
version of Eucalyptus. In this RC, we have fixed some bugs and are
happy to announce that we are now providing RPM packages of Eucalyptus
for OpenSuse version 11.1.

The RCs are intended for beta testers who are willing to try out the
software that has not been fully tested or completely documented. In
addition, we do not support installation upgrades from existing
deployments for the RCs. That is, an RC SHOULD NOT be used to upgrade a
functioning Eucalyptus installation -- any system-maintained meta-data
(including user accounts and state) will be reset by an RC and cannot be
retrieved.

If you are interested in helping us to harden the next release,
though, please install the RC as a "fresh" Eucalyptus system and send
us your feedback, bug reports, patches, via the discussion forum.
We would love to hear about your experiences, good or bad, with 1.5rc2.

Please, start here

http//eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/wiki/ReleaseCandidate

However, if you are interested in a stable and well documented release
then, please, wait just a little bit longer. We will finalize the RC
in between 1 an 2 weeks and incorporate the upgrade support so that a
pre-existing installation can be upgraded.

=== New Features at Version 1.5 ===

Eucalyptus version 1.5 incorporates several new features and
improvements. Most significantly, it introduces the availability of an
Elastic Block Store (EBS) compatible system for dynamically managing block
storage devices. Also, we have added support for the KVM hypervisor in
addition to Xen.

The following summarizes the changes from version 1.4

* EBS-compatible block storage system. Users can now
create block volumes, dynamically attach/detach them to running
VMs at runtime, and create snapshots of volumes.

* KVM hypervisor support. Eucalyptus now supports
both Xen and KVM transparently, and provides better VM Type
management for VM images.

* Added a new networking mode that enables elastic IPs and
security groups, without relying on software VLANs.

* Added the ability to run Eucalyptus as a non-root user.

* Improved web-based interface for cloud configuration.

* Improved VM transfer and caching performance.

For a more detailed list, see the 1.5 Changelog

http//eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/wiki/ChangeLog_v1.5

Best regards,
[]
The Eucalyptus Team