Eucalyptus Cloud Journal on Ulitzer

Eucalyptus Systems, the creator of the eponymous open source private cloud platform, has pushed out its first commercial product, the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE), which will let customers implement an on-premise cloud using VMware’s virtualization widgetry, including vSphere, ESX and ESXi.

Eucalyptus says EEE is the only private cloud computing solution available today for vSphere customers.

EEE also supports other popular hypervisors such as Xen and KVM.

Eucalyptus Systems co-founder and CTO Rich Wolski, former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), said, “EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies.”

EEE is built on Eucalyptus, an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own unmodified infrastructure. It claims to be the only cloud architecture to support the same APIs as public clouds such as Amazon.

With EEE, Eucalyptus leverages VMware’s vSphere, ESXi and ESX virtualization technologies to provide a private cloud.

It includes an image converter to help users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications compatible with Amazon EC2.

Since it also supports Xen and KVM EEE customers can choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single Amazon-compatible cloud API.

RedMonk principal analyst Stephen O’Grady says users will be able “to blend their VMware, KVM and Xen assets into a single cloud fabric while ensuring compatibility with existing public cloud options.”

EEE licenses are based on the number of processor cores on the physical host.