14 DAY TRIAL // Among the new features of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), there's a tool called Orchestra, which automatically installs Ubuntu across sets of computers.
As announced a few minutes ago by Mark Shuttleworth on his personal blog, Orchestra is an amazing tool, which helps system administrators to easily bring up a farm of servers or a cluster.
"What’s particularly cool about THAT is that it unifies the new world of private cloud with the old approach of Linux deployment in a cluster." - said Mark Shuttleworth, founder and Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life of the Ubuntu Linux project.
As an example, you can use Orchestra to deploy Hadoop across 3,000 server machines on bare metal, AWS or an OpenStack cloud.
In conclusion, it's very easy to build a small cloud with the new Ubuntu 11.10 operating system, especially with an utility like Orchestra.
Mark Shuttleworth thinks that with the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin), Orchestra will become even more useful for system admins around the world.