C12G Labs has just announced the availability of the OpenNebula Sandbox for Amazon EC2. OpenNebula is a widely-deployed open-source management solution for enterprise data center virtualization and private cloud computing that implements the Amazon EC2 interface. With the new Sandbox you can deploy in a single click an AWS-compatible OpenNebula nested cloud on Amazon EC2, where you can launch virtual machines within an Amazon instance.

The OpenNebula Sandbox is a CentOS 6.3 virtual machine appliance with a pre-configured automated installation of OpenNebula 3.8, a virtualization node using emulation (QEMU) ready to execute virtual machines, and prepared images to offer a feature rich cloud experience. Users are able to log into the OpenNebula cloud, monitor the managed resources, and launch instances of virtual machines without the hassle of configuring a physical infrastructure.

The Sandbox provides a fast and easy way for cloud trainers to teach OpenNebula, for cloud builders and operators to evaluate OpenNebula, and for developers to test their integrations against a real controlled OpenNebula environment. It is not intended for production environments due to the overhead in the hardware emulation. However the OpenNebula innovative functionality for cloudbursting opens the possibility of using the OpenNebula Sandbox as an Amazon-hosted broker to orchestrate and aggregate different Amazon availability zones.

OpenNebula Sandbox is part of a new program created by C12G Labs that aims to provide different tools and guides to eliminate the challenges of implementing a small-scale OpenNebula cloud for development, testing or integration. The Sandbox is also available for VirtualBox, KVM, and VMware.