Happy New Year, everyone! This is our first newsletter of 2013, summarizing everything that happened during the last month of 2012. In case you haven’t read it yet, remember we’ve also published a Year in Review post with all the exciting stuff that happened in the OpenNebula project and its community during 2012.

Technology

The Team is focused on the upcoming 4.0 release. An important number of bugs are being wrinkled out, and several and relevant features are being worked upon. You can follow the progress from the development portal.

The Sunstone facelift is advancing steadily, with usability being greatly improved. For instance, cluster management is going to be revamped completely, with the ability to create or update cluster with the appropriate resources, instead of adding them later. Also, CSS layout is being worked upon to achieve a cleaner interface. Changes are also going on with the command line interface, with a better interface and help.

Other aspects are also being considered, like core enhancement with audit trails, additions to virtual machine lifecycles (like the “hold” state). 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.

The mechanisms offered to try out OpenNebula has been extended. Besides the existing Sanboxes with OpenNebula 3.8 preinstalled (for VirtualBox, KVM and VMware ESX), there is a new, even easier to try out Sandbox available within Amazon EC2. With it, 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. Also, an effort was carried out to develop simple how-to guides describing the step-by-step process to deploy OpenNebula in the most common linux and hypervisor combinations. Currently there are guides for CentOS and VMware, and for CentOS and KVM.

Community

Another great contribution has been added to the OpenNebula ecosystem, again by the hand of China Mobile. In this case, a new set of drivers are available to support Linux Containers (LXC). This work has been done in the context of the Big Cloud Elastic Computing System, engined by OpenNebula.

As always, the OpenNebula community keeps an state of vibrant contributions. For instance, Robert Schweikert contributed a new init functionality, with the ability to bootstrap the OpenNebula database without starting the “oned” daemon. Moreover, a patch has been contributed by Simon Boulet to instantiate an existing template while providing custom attributes such as the CONTEXT or IMAGE_ID, without the need to Clone / create a user template. Another patch was also contributed by Simon boulet to create Vms on hold.

Also, we would like to thank the numerous people that provided feedback, either through the development portal or the user mailing list, with bug reporting, patches for bug fixing and the intense testing. Two big thumbs up to the OpenNebula community!

Outreach

We want to highlight a very special mention of OpenNebula by Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission and Comissioner for Digital Agenda, during a talk about how the EU is supporting Open ICT systems, namely open-source, open-procurement, and open-data.

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team or people deeply familiar with the technology will be speaking in the following events:

• FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, Belgium, February 2 and 3, 2013
• FlossUK, Managing Enterprise Clouds with OpenNebula, March 20 and 21, 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.