Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

Of course, the big news this month was the launch of OpenNebula 3.2, with lots of new features like:

• VMware, out-of-the-box support for VMware that now includes live migration, advanced contextualization, image and network management.
• Self-Service Portal, a new easy-to-use web-based end-user interface that complements the existing GUIs for the operation of the data-center (OpenNebula Sunstone) and for the management of multiple zones (OpenNebula Zones). You can see a couple screenshots of this new interface in this blog post.
• User & Group Management, to easily share virtual resources with other users and groups.
• Improved Security, that fixes security issues and incorporates new authentication drivers and performance improvements.
• Networking Drivers, a new set of drivers are now available to perform networking setup operations.
• Data Center Placement Policies, placement policies can be defined globally to optimize the resources of the datacenter. There are 4 predefined policies: packing, striping, load-aware, and custom.

We also recently updated the OpenNebula Public Cloud to OpenNebula 3.2.

Please note that, a few days ago, we released OpenNebula 3.2.1, a maintenance release that includes several bug fixes. This is a recommended update for everyone running the 3.x version of OpenNebula.

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, one of the new features in OpenNebula 3.x that is getting a lot of attention is OpenNebula Zones. We published a screencast that explains this feature in more detail, which we recently followed up with a second screencast showing how to manage Virtual Data Centers in OpenNebula.

Community

Ken Barber, from Puppet Labs, wrote a blog post (co-authored with our own Tino Vazquez) on how to “puppetize OpenNebula”, describing the integration between Puppet and OpenNebula.

The Business Application Modernization (BAM) Department of IBM India contributed two really interesting blog posts on using OpenNebula with Nested ESX VMWare, and on Using HybridFox and EC2 Interfaces on VMware-based OpenNebula Clouds.

We have a new contribution to the OpenNebula ecosystem: CLUES (Cluster Energy Saving), an energy management system for High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters and Cloud infrastructures. The main function of the system is to power off internal cluster nodes when they are not being used, and conversely to power them on when they are needed. Thanks to the Grid y Computación de Altas Prestaciones (GRyCAP) group at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia for this contribution!

oVirt and OpenNebula were featured as the main new components in cloud and virtualization in Fedora 17.

A new book titled “Open Source Cloud Computing Systems” (by Luis Vaquero, Juan Cáceres, and Juan Hierro) was just published, including a chapter on OpenNebula.

Sebastien Goasguen posted a video showing how to upload Virtual Machine Images to an OpenNebula cloud via S3 and Boto. The Austin on Rails group posted a video showing how to deploy Rails to your own private cloud with OpenNebula and Cobbler

SARA launched its new Cloud with OpenNebula 3. Some of their first users gave it glowing reviews.

Outreach

We have the following events coming up:

• OpenNebula will participate in the Open Source Virtualization and Cloud devroom at FOSDEM 2012 (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting), Brussels, Belgium, February 4-5, 2012.
• We will be giving an invited talk at Cloudscape IV – Advances on Interoperability & Cloud Computing Standards, Brussels, Belgium, February 23-24, 2012
• A workshop on basic and advanced use of OpenNebula will take place in the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC) in Nuremberg, Germany, April 24-26, 2012

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Outreach page.