OpenStack Dalmatian debuts with a new dashboard, better security and GPU-wrangling

If you think VMware has gone to the dogs, maybe check it out?

OpenStack Dalmatian, the 30th edition of the open source cloud stack, has bounded out of the kennel.

The Open InfraFoundation, which tends the project, is excited about this release amid what it calls "a significant surge in adoption, attributed largely to the software's popularity as a VMware alternative." The stack also apparently possesses "unique suitability" for AI, ML, and HPC workloads.

VMware users may find this release a little more approachable as it has mainlined Skyline – a new dashboard that's said to make OpenStack easier to wrangle and offers a more refined and intuitive design.

For AI/ML/HPC users, Dalmatian adds the ability to reserve GPU-powered instances – a handy change as nobody running a training or inferencing wants their accelerators to be assigned to other workloads mid-job.

That change came in the Nova module, which offers IaaS services for VMs. Also new in Nova is the ability to automatically detect virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) support for compute services if libvirt version is above 8.0.0 and if swtpm is installed on the node. It will also automatically get the TPM models that are supported. That's a nice security management tweak.

The Ironic module, which deals with bare metal provisioning, has gained runbooks – described as "a new API concept to enable self-service of maintenance items on nodes by project members" that apply curated lists to replace procedures for manual cleaning or servicing.

Ironic has also added a requirement for rescue passwords to be hashed, has reduced the logged nodes information during the cleaning phase to avoid showing sensitive data, and has hardened the communication between its services and agent by making HTTPS URLs a default requirement.

The Cinder block storage service has new drivers to better support storage kit from Dell, NetApp, HPE, Fujitsu, and Hitachi.

OpenStack is big: the project encompasses 33 sub-projects, 21 of which have release notes you can read on the Dalmatian release page.

Dalmatian is a non-SLURP release – meaning it's a filler between more substantial OpenStack versions under the project's new-ish release cadence plan.

OpenStack Epoxy, due in April 2025, is next off the rank. Dalmatian will go end of life in April 2026. ®