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

Technology

The big news this month is the release of the OpenNebula 3.4 (including a maintenance release, OpenNebula 3.4.1). This release is focused on extending the storage capabilities of OpenNebula, including support for multiple datastores. The use of multiple datastores provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations between storage servers, defining different SLA and QoS policies for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage.

OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other systems, especially in the core with the support of logic resource pools, the EC2 API with the support of elastic IPs, the Sunstone and Self-service portals with new cool features, and the EC2 hybrid cloud driver that now supports EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPCs.

As usual, the OpenNebula community has played an active role in shaping this release, and OpenNebula 3.4 includes contributions from Akamai, Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.

And now that OpenNebula 3.4 is out, we have updated our public cloud to 3.4.

But that’s not all! We will be releasing our first sprint of the 3.6 release cycle soon, including more community contributions, such as the resched command contributed by Research in Motion.

Community

We are happy to announce that the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will feature OpenNebula 3.2.1. We would like to thank Damien Raude-Morvan for maintaining the Debian package and Fabrice Coutadeur for helping us with the sync request, and the friendly people from #ubuntu-devel in Freenode for helping us out every time we asked. Fedora 17 Beta “Beefy Miracle” was also recently released with OpenNebula.

We have a new contribution to the OpenNebula ecosystem: Onenox, an extension of the OpenFlow controller NOX so that it can be called directly by the econe server of OpenNebula. Advanced network services can be enabled by onenox by pushing new rules set onto the Open vSwitch of a cloud infrastructure. Onenox is used to implement the well known Amazon services Elastic IP and security groups.

Rutgers University is building a solar-powered data center that will use an energy-aware version of OpenNebula called GreenNebula.

A team in Engineering (partially funded by Venus-C) have released a tool, ovf4one, which provides an OCCI interface that accepts OVF and provisions resources through the OpenNebula OCA interface.

We recently received new language contributions for OpenNebula Self-Service, our end-user web interface: fr_FR and fr_CA. As happy as we we were to receive these contributions, it was too late to include them in the official OpenNebula 3.4 release.

The cloud-b-lab blog continues to publish some excellent tutorials on OpenNebula, including a recent one on installing OpenNebula 3.4 and VMware ESX 4.1.

Outreach

This month, we gave an intensive tutorial on basic and advance usage and configuration of OpenNebula 3.2.1 at the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC 2012) in Nuremberg, Germany, on the 25th and 26th of April 2012. Make sure to check out our blog post of the event, including slides.

OpenNebula will be holding a presentation on the LinuxTag Conference 2012, which will take place from the 23rd to the 26th of May in Berlin, Germany. The presentation is on Wednesday 23rd, at 11:00 in the London room.

Our Project Director (Ignacio M. Llorente) will participate at OSBC 2012 in San Francisco the 21 and 22 of May and will spend the rest of the week in the Bay Area attending some meetings and giving talks in several locations like NASA Ames. Send us an email to contact@opennebula.org if you are interested in meeting with Ignacio.

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