Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months. We are very proud of our toddler (OpenNebula) arriving at the mature age of five years. Congrats!

Technology

The OpenNebula team is setting the engine to full throttle for the upcoming 4.0 version. There is a set of new cool features that will ensure that the best functionality is present in your favorite cloud management platform. This release is focused on usability, an important effort is being made to ensure that the user experience is as smooth and productive as possible.

On of the mains efforts is focused on giving a facelift to the Sunstone GUI, with a complete revamp of the user dialogs, as well as new options like embedded SSH connections to the virtual machines. Moreover, the command line interface is also undergoing several changes to make them easier to use.

The OpenNebula daemon and the orbiting components are also being scrutinized to produce better logging, so the user and the cloud admin can figure out what is going on in their virtual and physical infrastructure. This will be used as well to offer an audit trail feature.

Another important feature that will be introduced in the upcoming 4.0 release is the ability to create disk snapshots, which comes in very handy for the day to day service management. Other number of improvements are on the oven, like the ability to handle RBD block devices.

It is worth mentioning the new methods to try out OpenNebula, like the Sandboxes with OpenNebula 3.8 preinstalled (for VirtualBox, KVM and VMware  ESX, and an upcoming Amazon EC2 AMI), and the ongoing effort to develop simple how-to guides.

C12G Labs released OpenNebula 3.8 Pro, the enterprise edition of its widely-deployed open-source management solution for enterprise data center virtualization and private cloud computing. OpenNebulaPro integrates the most recent stable version of OpenNebula (3.8) with bugfixes, performance, and scalability patches developed by the community and by C12G for its customers and partners. OpenNebula 3.8 (codename Twin Jet), released one month ago, enhances its AWS and OCCI API implementations and provides a tighter integration with VMware and KVM.

C12G also released the first stable release of the OpenNebulaApps, a suite of tools for users and administrators of OpenNebula to simplify and optimize cloud application management. OpenNebulaApps provides a service management layer on top of OpenNebula by configuring the software stack in the applications, managing multi-tiered applications, providing configurable services from a catalog, and building your own private market to distribute applications across several OpenNebula instances. Cloud applications consist of complex software stacks, OpenNebulaApps helps to manage their life-cycle and contributes to significantly reduce the time needed to build, distribute, and deploy cloud applications.

Community

New contributions form this month from our vibrant community includes a new post explaining how to use OpenNebula and ZFS. Also, folks at SZTAKI have contributed an amazing patch to provide full iSCSI support, we would like to send a big two thumps up to them for this. Same people at SZTAKI have contributed a new appliance to the OpenNebula Marketplace as well as ATA-over-Ethernet drivers. We would like to highlight the talk given by Giovanni Toraldo in the Develer workshop.

We know that there are a high number of infrastructures being cloudify thanks to the use of OpenNebula, but we want to devote some lines to this rural school pilot program for its aim, it closeness and philosophy.

OpenNebula ecosystem keeps growing, we want to give a special mention to Hedera and its great service manager Kanopya. Also, we want to mention the release of new version (0.88) of CLUES,  an energy management system for High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters and Cloud infrastructures.

It is worth mentioning that, as part of FOSDEM (one of the most important european events in the open source arena), the OSS Cloud IaaS projects (OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack) are organizing a Cloud devroom. This Cloud devroom, will be an excellent opportunity to promote your solutions with OpenNebula, share your experiences operating/building/designing a Cloud with OpenNebula at your company or institution,  meet some of the OpenNebula developers, and discuss with others about OSS Cloud technologies.

Outreach

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

• LinuxCon Europe 2012, Barcelona, Spain, November 5-7, 2012
• Towards an EU strategy of Cloud Computing for Government and Science, Open Workshop by IDC EMEA and TRUST IT on behalf of DG Connect, Brussels, Belgium, November 26th, 2012
• BeLUG, Berlin Linux User Group, Berlin, Germany, November 28th, 2012.
• GARR Workshop on Distributed Computing and Storage, Rome, Italy, November 29 and 30, 2012

• FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, Belgium, February 2 and 3, 2013

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.