Univention Corporate Server on OpenStack

In the last two weeks we've been working to build an OpenCms debian package for Univention Corporate Server (UCS) to integrate it in UCS AppCenter and we'd like to share our experience and thoughts with you in this short blog post.

UCS is built on top of Debian Wheezy and comes with a nice AppCenter and Microsoft Active Directory functions for small to mid size businesses and supports also the takeover of Microsoft Activer Diretory into it own Directory Server which is built fron OpenLDAP.

Univention provides a QCOW2 image for OpenStack and can be deployed in matter of minutes on OpenStack and provides a nice AppCenter which can be extended by providing a debian package of your favorite apps in univention repository. The AppCenter can be accessed by business users through univention management console, if installed on bare-metal, system administrators can use the virtual machine manager to instantiate KVM instances or even manage Amazon EC2 instances or connect to your private OpenStack cloud.

One thing which we'd like to see in the near future is the support for LXC / Docker containers, which will provide a much higher isolation and faster integration of apps into UCS AppCenter.

So, if you'd like to give it a try, you can request your OpenStack QCOW2 image download link here.