Scale out with Ubuntu Server
Ubuntu Server brings economic and technical scalability to your datacentre, public or private. Whether you want to deploy an OpenStack cloud, a Hadoop cluster or a 50,000-node render farm, Ubuntu Server delivers the best value scale-out performance available.
What’s new in 16.04 LTS
Ubuntu Server
- Supported for five years by Canonical
- Runs on all major architectures - x86, x86-64, ARM v7, ARM64, POWER8 and IBM s390x (LinuxONE)
- ZFS stable, feature-rich file system with snapshot capabilities
- LXD Linux container hypervisor enhancements including QoS and resource controls (CPU, memory, block I/O, storage quota)
- Install Ubuntu Core Snaps
- First production release of DPDK - line speed kernel networking
- Linux 4.4 kernel and systemd service manager
- Certification as a guest on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, IBM and HP Cloud
- Updates to Tomcat (v8), Postgresql (v9.5), Docker v(1.10), Puppet (v3.8.5), Qemu (v2.5), Libvirt (v1.3.1), LXC (v2.0), and MySQL (v5.6)
Ubuntu OpenStack
- Supported for five years by Canonical
- Updated to the Mitaka release, including automated installation, queuing/notification and the integration of database-as-a-service
- Nova LXD driver - deploy OpenStack instances as system containers, dramatically increasing per-node density
- Juju OpenStack bundle - automated deployment of OpenStack into LXD system containers
- ZFS support for LXD OpenStack hosts
- Certified by Microsoft to host Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as guests, under its Server Virtualisation Validation Program (SVVP)
- OpenStack software, Juju, MAAS, LXD on IBM LinuxONE mainframe
Ubuntu Server on Power
In addition to x86 and ARM servers, Ubuntu is supported on the Power architecture. For the enterprise datacentre, this means you can now build your infrastructure on any hardware you choose.
Performance and versatility
Agile, secure, deploy-anywhere technology for fast-moving companies
It doesn’t matter whether you want to deploy a NoSQL database, web farm or cloud. Ubuntu has the performance and versatility you need. Certified by leading hardware OEMs and with comprehensive deployment tools, so you can get the most from your infrastructure.
Our regular release cycle means that we support most of the latest applications. A lean initial installation and integrated deployment and application modeling technologies make Ubuntu Server a great solution for simple deployment and management at scale.
Works with all your hardware and software
Scale without limits
With no licence fees or subscription costs, Ubuntu Server can help you scale your data centre efficiently. Subscriptions to Ubuntu Advantage, Canonical’s management programme, include support for unlimited virtualisation and, unlike legacy enterprise Linux distributions, the price does not increase with additional CPU cores or sockets.
Ubuntu release cycle
A release schedule you can depend on
Stay up-to-date with regular updates and upgrades
Long-term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu Server are supported by Canonical for five years. Every six months, interim releases bring new features, while hardware enablement updates add support for the latest machines to all supported LTS releases.
Landscape — support and systems management
The Ubuntu Advantage service programme provides fast problem resolution, direct access to Ubuntu experts and efficient administration with the Ubuntu systems management package, Landscape.
Landscape enables you to automate updates and control physical, virtual and cloud servers from a single interface. It’s easy to set up and easy to use, giving you the power to manage thousands of machines as easily as you can manage one.
Juju — application modeling
With the option of a command line or browser-based interface, Juju enables you to deploy entire workloads in just a few clicks. It works on public clouds like AWS and HP Cloud, private clouds built on OpenStack and even directly on bare metal, via MAAS.
MAAS — bare metal provisioning
MAAS is a time-saving provisioning system that makes it quick and easy to set up the physical hardware on which to deploy complex services, like Ubuntu’s OpenStack cloud infrastructure. Just plug in your servers, connect them to the network and let MAAS do the rest.
LXD — system containers
LXD, the Linux container hypervisor, merges the speed and density of containers with the manageability and security of traditional virtual machines. Economics are directly tied to density, and no other virtualisation technology is as fast or dense as LXD.
Deploys anywhere
Choose from the most popular public clouds
Use Ubuntu Server in the public cloud. Ubuntu cloud guest offers all the benefits of Ubuntu Server, specially tailored for public cloud infrastructures and without any licence restrictions.
Ubuntu is the most widely used developer platform for open‐source cloud building, the reference operating system for OpenStack, and the most popular cloud guest operating system on private and public clouds globally.
Built for big data and cloud
Speed and simplicity, on bare metal or in the cloud
With its new rapid deployment tools, Ubuntu significantly speeds up the installation of server instances on bare metal. And our service orchestration tool, Juju, makes deploying big data services surprisingly simple — on bare metal or in the cloud. That’s why vendors like 10gen, Cloudera, Couchbase, DataStax, Hortonworks, LexisNexis and Map-R partner with us.
The fast track to virtualisation and containers
Ready to boost efficiencies and reduce costs? Virtualise your servers with Ubuntu Server, KVM and LXD. When you use a secure, lean version of Ubuntu as a guest operating system for your application, you can create virtual machines and machine containers in seconds. KVM, LXD, Xen, VMware, Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Docker are all first class experiences with Ubuntu Server. KVM virtualisation is now also available in Ubuntu Server for ARM and IBM POWER8.
Canonical supports an open ecosystem of operating system intercompatibility. By providing choice, users of Ubuntu for both servers and clouds are empowered to succeed with any workload. We encourage others to do the same and offer support for all (currently supported) versions of Ubuntu Server running on other virtualisation platforms, including KVM on other commercially available Linux distributions, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
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All guests are welcome on Ubuntu
A thriving community
Exchange expertise and ideas with thousands of other IT professionals
Want to talk to other Ubuntu users straightaway? Share ideas and get advice and help from our large, active community of IT professionals. As a community, we set high standards for friendliness and tolerance, we welcome your questions and contributions!
