Cisco released its own edition of OpenStack, the open-source operating system for cloud infrastructure in conjunction with this week’s OpenStack Summit in San Diego.

The distribution contains all core services for OpenStack’s Essex and Folsom releases, as well as installation scripts and other components that help install and run it in production, Kyle Mestery, technical leader, data center edge services engineering, at Cisco, wrote in a blog post.

While tested on Ubintu 12.04 using Cisco Nexus switches and UCS servers, the distribution is not limited to Cisco hardware. “You do not need to run the Cisco Edition of OpenStack on Cisco hardware, but it is validated on this hardware configuration,” Mestery wrote.

Additions to the distribution specific to Cisco include using Puppet to automate service deployment. The Essex version has other software components needed for production deployments.

Cisco has done work on service assurance and built the compute monitoring stack on Nagios, Collectd and Graphite. All three are open-source IT infrastructure monitoring tools.

Cisco integrated compute performance and metric graphs with OpenStack’s Horizon dashboard.

To ensure high availability, Cisco used open-source components ha-proxy, kickstartd and galera.

Cisco’s OpenStack can be downloaded for free from a Cisco FTP site. The company has also put together a wiki with information on the packages.