OpenNebula 1.4 (Hourglass)

16th December, 2009. The OpenNebula team is proud to announce the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 (Hourglass), a new stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager.

OpenNebula focuses on incorporating bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing. OpenNebula 1.4 aims to be the swiss-army knife of Cloud Computing, letting you deploy any type of Cloud.

Please note that OpenNebula 1.4 is suitable for production settings, and therefore it is meant to be a replacement for the last stable release, OpenNebula 1.2.

Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are...

  • EC2 Query API interface on top of OpenNebula, so you can turn your OpenNebula installation in a Public Cloud
  • Support of OGF's Open Cloud Compute Interface specification
  • Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
  • Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
  • Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
  • A new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) to easily develop any cloud interface or cloud application
  • Easy integration with your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
  • Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
  • A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples
  • Support for LVM storage

Detailed list of Changes in OpenNebula 1.4

Here you can find a detailed list of changes grouped by OpenNebula component, the complete list of changes

General

  • New documentation, hopefully clearer than the previous one
  • New development and collaborative portal, we have migrated our development portal to Redmine (and we are quite happy with it!). A new section hosting third-party projects is available to the community

Core

  • Multiple user support, you can now define multiple users each one with her own access rights to the virtual infrastructure
  • New Hook system, that executes custom scripts on specific events. You can easily pass VM-related attributes to your hooks
  • New Context support, to pass custom data (including information from other VMs, files or directories) to a virtual machine at boot time
  • New and extended database schemas, support for direct access to the database is now deprecated. Applications should use the new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) facility
  • Improved VM life-cycle, to gracefully handle VM information block-outs and deletes in any state

Drivers

  • New VMware drivers, including information and transfer using the VMware's VI API.
  • Re-design of the driver subsystem to improve its scalability and performance
  • Improved Xen and KVM drivers

Virtual Infrastructure Interfaces

  • New OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) framework, that exposes the complete OpenNebula functionality
  • New XML-RPC methods, that includes user authentication, pool access and the new user methods. Now no access to the DB is required, applications should start migrating to the new interfaces.
  • Libvirt interface has been moved to the libvirt repository
  • Re-implementation of the CLI to make use of the new interface
  • New CLI for user management
  • Support for LVM storage

Hybrid Cloud Components

  • New ElasticHosts drivers
  • Support for multiple EC2 clouds
  • Hybrid cloud drivers has been migrated to the new driver engine

Cloud Interfaces

  • New EC2 Query-API service on top of OpenNebula. The service has been implemented using the new OCA facility. The service exposes a subset of the Amazon's Query API.
  • Amazon S3 subset, the EC2 Query service include functions to upload and register images to the OpenNebula EC2-Query cloud
  • EC2 Query Tools to use the EC2 query service, you can potentially use any other EC2-Query compatible tool or utility with minor modifications
  • OCCI REST service on top of OpenNebula using the OCA API. The service exposes an implementation of the Open Cloud Computing Interface specification . The OpenNebula distribution also includes commands to interact with the service.

Getting OpenNebula 1.4

The complete source tree for OpenNebula can be freely downloaded. The compilation has been tested on the main linux distributions, please check the platform notes for more information.

About OpenNebula

Solved Bugs

This is the list of solved bugs in OpenNebula 1.4:

Contributors

Contributors to this release include, but are not limited to:

  • Sander Klous, NIKHEF: LVM Support
  • Sebastien Goasguen, Clemson University and CERN: LVM Support, Testing
  • Ulrich Schwickerath, CERN: Testing
  • Jeroen Nijhof, NijhofNet: MODEL Patch
  • Shi Jin, VrSTORM: Testing

If your name is missing from the list, please contact contact@opennebula.org.