Eucalyptus Systems was expected to update the eponymous open source private cloud project Wednesday improving the free GPL-based widgetry's scaling.

Eucalyptus 2.0, described as a major rev, is supposed to be able to support massive private and hybrid clouds. Its performance has also been enhanced and it should deploy without modification on existing IT infrastructure.

The company can't quantify exactly how scalable the thing is but its notion of scalability includes both front-end transactional scalability and back-end resource scalability. Eucalyptus 2.0 provides increased back-end cluster as well as node controller scale improvements.

The widgetry also supports iSCSI targets for EBS volumes now, which is supposed to make overlaying a Eucalyptus cloud on top of existing IT infrastructure easier. Users can move the EBS controller machine anywhere on the cloud, including outside the broadcast domain of the cloud nodes.

KVM virtio support has been added. KVM virtio is an abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. It means users can choose between emulated device drivers or direct kernel-supported I/O devices via virtio for performance tuning.

To maintain Eucalyptus' compatibility with Amazon it's been given S3 versioning. Users can do version control on the objects stored in Eucalyptus Walrus. Through the Eucalyptus API, users can retrieve specific versions of objects.

The rev can be downloaded at http://open.eucalyptus.com.

The company says it's enhanced the site to make submitting patches easier and more transparent. It's got online click-through agreements so community members can e-sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and every contributor can now view and track issues on the Eucalyptus issue tracker portal as well as see contributions made by the community. And there's a new section for the community to contribute directly to the Eucalyptus documentation.