Canonical Ubuntu management tool gets hefty upgrade

Canonical has released a significant update to its Landscape Ubuntu system management tool.

Canonical’s Landscape product manager said:

“We have really been cranking up the level of effort with Landscape over the past year or so”, “Landscape is a very important piece of our enterprise strategy, and so Canonical’s commitment has increased dramatically.”

The new version of the software, Landscape 12.09, is designed to better manage systemwide software updates. It offers more compliance reporting. New version exposes its API (application programming interface) so it can be connected with other system management tools(for example: Puppet) and software allows administrators to install Ubuntu over a network.

Landscape launched in 2008 is a software for administrators to monitor and update a fleet of computers with Canonical’s  desktop or server Linux distribution.

This version is released after nearly a year and offers many new features aimed squarely at providing all the functionality typically enjoyed by Microsoft Windows management tools.

Landscape can now support up to 40,000 clients from a single console. Ubuntu Advantage starts at US$100 per desktop and $700 per server per year, with tiered discounts based on the number of computers being managed.