Ubuntu now available on VMware vCloud Air

London 21st August 2014: VMware, Inc., and Canonical today announced that certified Ubuntu LTS images are available on VMware vCloud® Air™, an enterprise-grade cloud platform offering customers performance, reliability, and security for their cloud infrastructures. The relationship brings optimised and fully supported Ubuntu LTS images to VMware’s customers.

Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system in the cloud and is estimated to represent almost 70 percent of the workloads running in public clouds today. Canonical has worked with VMware to test, optimise and validate Ubuntu images for VMware vCloud Air giving customers a consistent, quality cloud experience across platforms and immediate access to updates.

“Canonical’s enterprise-class Ubuntu LTS is one of the most popular cloud operating systems requested by vCloud Air customers,” says Ajay Patel, vice president of Applications Services, vCloud Air, VMware. “By integrating Ubuntu into our portfolio of pre-configured OS templates, VMware is able to offer our customers another secure and versatile cloud operating system in a quick-to-deploy virtual machine.”

Chris Kenyon, SVP of Canonical’s Cloud team comments; “VMware has been a leader in the enterprise private cloud and has successfully broken into the enterprise public cloud marketspace. Customers can trust Ubuntu running on VMware vCloud Air because Ubuntu is tested, verified, and supported by Canonical, and certified by VMware to run in an VMware ESXi™ environment.”

Existing Ubuntu Advantage support services customers can easily take their instances of Ubuntu into cloud environments from either on-premise systems or other cloud environments without having to purchase additional or new agreements.

VMware’s vCloud Air is built on its VMware vSphere® foundation, which fully supports Ubuntu guests. It allows a company to use its existing VMware ESXi hypervisors as a foundation for running OpenStack. In addition, it offers seamless integration with VMware NSX™, VMware’s software defined networking (SDN) solution, which allows customers to reap the operational and economic benefits of a virtualised network.

For more information on leveraging Ubuntu and VMware to build and manage OpenStack clouds view the Ubuntu listing on the vCloud Air Marketplace, watch Canonical’s on-demand webinar here, or read our Q&A on OpenStack +VMware here.

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About Canonical

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project and is the world’s leading provider of linux guests to the public cloud and OpenStack based cloud deployments. Ubuntu delivers reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments. Telcos and service providers trust Ubuntu for OpenStack and it is used by global enterprises such as AT&T, Bloomberg, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange, Time Warner Cable and Yandex.

Canonical’s automation tools, Juju and MaaS increase efficiency and orchestration With developers, support staff and engineering centres all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Canonical is a privately held company.

VMware, VMware vCloud Air, VMware vSphere, VMware NSX and VMware ESXi are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.