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Rackspace adds FreeBSD 9, CentOS 6.3 support to cloud servers
Web hosting provider Rackspace announced on Friday that FreeBSD 9 and CentOS 6.3 operating systems are now available with its cloud servers.
This news comes a month after web hosting provider ServerPronto announced that it would provide free hosting to CentOS.
Along with support for new operating systems, Rackspace has ended support for Fedora 15 and Debian 5. The images will be removed from Cloud Servers on August 27, 2012, according to Rackspace.
“We recommend customers consider Fedora 17 and Debian 6 for production servers needing these distributions of Linux,” Rackspace product manager Richard Goodwin says in a blog post.
CentOS 6.3 was released two weeks ago, and is the latest version of the CentOS distribution. According to a blog post on Unixmen, version 6.3 will be supported until November 30, 2020. Some of the major changes for this release include tools for moving physical and virtual machines from their current form to a virtual KVM machine.
Rackspace says FreeBSD has been a popular request for a while. In order to make it possible, Rackspace needed to make a couple of “fundamental enhancements to cloud servers.”
“One such change is support for non-ext3 and NTFS file systems (FreeBSD runs ZFS),” Goodwin says.
Customers have also asked for more control over file systems, so Rackspace created a new option called Disk Configuration. Disk Configuration allows a file system to either automatically expand to the size limits of the instance being created, or to be manually managed by the user.
“Previously, disk configuration was an internal setting that Rackspace used, but we have carried this feature forward into OpenStack and our upcoming Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack offering, which gives you control over this setting,” Goodwin says. “That means you will be able to configure any image for either automatic or manual Disk Configuration. Simplicity or control – you get to choose.”
Talk back: Have you made any changes to the operating systems you support with cloud servers recently? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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[Source: Web Host Rackspace Adds FreeBSD 9, CentOS 6.3 Support to Cloud Servers]
