Check this Newsletter to find out the what kept us busy this month, including the latest developments and events of the OpenNebula project and the community during this last month of August, and the plans for the upcoming months.

We would like to remind you that the third OpenNebulaConf, due in October in Barcelona, is around the corner! You are still in time until the 8th of September for the early bird discount.

Technology

August warm haven’t had an impact on the dev team! No slugginesh after the release of the first Beta of OpenNebula 4.14 ‘Great A’Tuin’. We want to thank our community for the excellent feedback on this important release, packed with features. It is of the utmost importance to fine tune OpenNebula, so thanks!

As mentioned, the team has not been drowsy at all. A few more features are currently being polished to make their debut in ‘Great A’Tuin’. For instance, the ability to resize an existing disk for all the supported OpenNebula backends. If your VM needs more disk space than the one provided by the images used for its disk, you can now set a new size prior to instantiate the VM, OpenNebula will grow the disk and the guest OS will adapt the filesystem to the now bigger disk at boot time. OpenNebula cloud admins can now maintain a VM Template catalog with different disk sizes without the need of cloning and storing the same disk with different sizes.

Another great addition for 4.14 is the support of GPU access from Virtual Machines. This is great news for HPC and science clouds, since virtualized applications can get now the performance boot of the direct access to a GPU card.

Also, the team has worked in stabilizing the previous and exciting new features: qcow2 and Ceph snapshots (live in the case of qcow2), Sunstone refactoring, importing running VMs, the possibility to cold attach disks and network interfaces to powered off machines; improvements in accounting to keep track of disk usage (with the ability to control disk consumption through quotas); better logging in several areas; the ability to pass scripts to VMs for guest OS customization; and many others.

Community

OpenNebula community keeps at it even during the estival season. For instance, working on supporting the latest versions of OpenNebula stable in your favorite linux platforms, directly from their repositories. A good example of this is the new packages for Debian unstable.

It is always nice to see OpenNebula being adopted, but if the deployment is within an institution as prestigious as Harvard University, the is double the fun! We are sure OpenNebula will meet their expectations and we are thrilled about the feedback they will surely provide.

A good example of how vibrant the OpenNebula community is can be seen in the fact that its ecosystem doesn’t stop to grow! A new OpenNebula storage driver for Saturnring open-source scale-out iSCSI-based block storage is most welcome and very useful addition. Thanks!

Outreach

The upcoming third edition of the OpenNebulaConf will be held in Barcelona this October 2015. The Conference is a great opportunity to meetup and share your OpenNebula experiences with the community. Your company may be interested in the sponsorship opportunities for OpenNebulaConf 2015. We would like to take this opportunity to also thank our Platinum Sponsors PTisp and StorPool; Gold Sponsors ungleich, Xen Server and NodeWeaver; and Silver Sponsors Runtastic and No Limit Network. If your company is interested, you can apply with this form. If you are willing to attend, you are still in time for the early bird discount.

The agenda for the OpenNebulaConf 2015 is available, check out the high quality speakers. The agenda includes two keynote speakers:

• Karsten Nielsen from Unity Technologies will give a keynote about how they apply the KISS approach to their federated infrastructure using OpenNebula.
• Armin Deliomini from Runtastic will tell us the story of their way to transition their private cloud from small to larger scale.

The OpenNebula project has been invited to participate in the 2015 BESIIICGEM Cloud Computing Summer School in Beijing, aimed at training a number of young researchers, spreading Cloud Computing knowledge across the physics computing community.

The reference middleware stack of choice for the practical activities will be OpenNebula, chosen for its simplicity and our experience in its use for scientific computing use cases.

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team will be speaking in the following events:

• Cloud Open Europe 2015, Dublin, Oct 5, 2015
• VMworld Europe, Barcelona, Oct 12, 2015
• OSCON Europe, Amsterdam, 26-28 October 2015

If you are interested in receiving OpenNebula training, check the schedule for 2015 public classes at OpenNebula Headquarters. Next public OpenNebula training will take place next 15th of September in Madrid. Please contact us if your would like to request training near you.

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Events page. We have also created a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.