The OpenNebula team is pleased to approach winter with the immediate availability of the final version of OpenNebula 4.4, codename Retina. As a project driven by user needs, this release includes important features that meet real demands from production environments, with a focus on optimization of storage, monitoring, cloud bursting, and public cloud interfaces.
OpenNebula Retina includes support for multiple system datastores, which enables a much more efficient usage of the storage resources for running Virtual Machines. This feature ships with different scheduling policies for storage load balancing, intended to instruct OpenNebula to spread the running Virtual Machines across different storage mediums to optimize their use. This translates in the ability to define more than one disk (or other backend) to hold running VMs in a particular cluster. Monitoring subsystem in OpenNebula underwent a major redesign as well, effectively switching from a pulling mechanism to a pushing model, with the implications in scalability improvements.
An important effort has been made in the hybrid cloud model (cloud bursting). Using the AWS API tools have been deprecated in favor of the new Ruby SDK released, which allows the support of new AWS mechanisms like for instance IAM. Also, now is possible to fully support hybrid VM templates. Moreover, the AWS public cloud interface implemented by OpenNebula has been revisited and extended to support new functionality, as well as improved so the instance types are offered to the end user from OpenNebula templates.
This is a stable release and so a recommended update that incorporates several bug fixes since 4.4 RC. We’ve done our best to keep compatibility with OpenNebula 4.2, so any application developed for previous versions should work without effort. In any case, be sure to check the compatibility and upgrade guides. We invite you to download it and to check the QuickStart guides, as well as to browse the documentation, which has also been properly updated.
As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Retina Nebula (IC 4406) is a planetary nebula near the western border of the constellation Lupus, the Wolf. It has dust clouds and has the shape of a torus.
Thanks to all people and organizations that have contributed to OpenNebula 4.4!
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