OpenNebula 3.8 is getting prepared, the team is finishing the testing procedure and the beta release is just a few days away. Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

The OpenNebula team is very busy with the next major release, OpenNebula 3.8. We expect to throw a beta release into the wild in a few days, followed by the final release about  halfway through the month.

This release will come with several improvements in the VMware drivers, including the ability to handle VMFS volumes, opening a broad number of possible scenarios storage-wise. Important improvements are also being made in the EC2 interface, with the inclusion of  key-pairs and EBS volume handling; the OCCI interface, with new actions and hotplugging functionality and the KVM hypervisor, with control groups (cgroups) integration. Also, there are new actions for the core lifecycle VM management, with the ability to perform Power on and Power off over VMs. CLI improvements were also develop, as well as SPICE support through Sunstone.

An effort was also carried out to come closer to the popular linux distributions, the new packages for  3.8 distributed by the OpenNebula team for each supported distribution will be the same as the packages contained in the linux distros.

Community

Our user base is growing at a healthy pace. Our more relevant users and contributors have reached us with valuable testimonials, expressing their opinion of OpenNebula and the reasons of their choice over other cloud manager platforms. These testimonials include opinions by industry and research leaders, including China Mobile, Dell, IBM, Logica, FermiLab, CERN, European Space Agency and SARA.

Research in Motion (RIM) have published an open-source component, Carina, that allows to automatically deploy, scale and manage the availability of multi-VM application clusters according to policies such as time of day, load-based, service priority, failure events, or custom metrics.

We want to give a big thumbs up to our community for the translation efforts. Sunstone and Self-service are available in 8 different languages, and more are underway, making a total of 17!.

The demo cloud offered to try out OpenNebula has reached 2,000 users. You may want to register for an account to try out OpenNebula Sunstone, OCCI and EC2.

Outreach

An interesting post have been written in GigaOM about the role OpenNebula plays in cloud computing innovation. Since we started the OpenNebula project in 2005, we have helped many organizations develop value by building innovative cloud services and solutions to meet their user and customer needs in new ways or to meet new market needs.

This past month a number of events were participated by OpenNebula members:

• The 22nd IFIP World Computer Congress, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 24-26, 2012
• BeLUG, Berlin Linux User Group, Berlin, Germany, September 26th, 2012

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

• GigaOM Structure:Europe, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 16-17, 2012
• LinuxCon Europe 2012, Barcelona, Spain, November 5-7, 2012

Also, Netways will be offering a workshop on OpenNEbula during November:

• OpenNebula training, Nuremberg, Germany, November 21-22, 2012

If you will be attending any of these events and want to meet with a member of the OpenNebula team, drop us a line at contact@opennebula.org. 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.