Christmas is just around the corner, and we wanted to wish you happy holidays, as well as let you know about the main news from the last month regarding the OpenNebula project, including what you can expect in the coming months.

This last month was OpenNebula’s 6th anniversary. It’s good to know that after the long way, your favourite cloud platform has evolved and turn into a mature and proven solution.

Technology

After two beta versions and one release candidate, where OpenNebula underwent all the tests defined in the release process, OpenNebula 4.4 Retina was released.

A significant number of cool new features were included in the end in OpenNebula 4.4. Retina. Probably the feature with the biggest impact on OpenNebula scalability is the new monitoring driver, which changes the traditional polling mechanism for a pushing one. This enables OpenNebula to monitor 25,000 VMs every two minutes! Check out more details here.

Another area that underwent significant improvements in the cloud bursting model, which in OpenNebula is tied to transparency to both end users and cloud administrators to use and maintain the cloud bursting functionality. Cloud bursting drivers have been vastly improved, the underlying technology being shifted from using Amazon API Toos to the new AWS SDK for Ruby. Functionality is also richer i, with support to define EBS optimized VMs, to define VM tagging, etc. Read more here.

The EC2 interface offered by OpenNebula to deploy public clouds has also been enhanced in OpenNebula 4.4 Retina. For instance, instance types are based on OpenNebula templates instead of files, EBS support has been extended, etc. More details in the blog.

Probably one of the most interesting feature for cloud administrators present in OpenNebula Retina is the ability to use multiple system datastores with storage load balancing. This allows to add a second backend to start deploying new VMs when the system datastore is running out of space. Details in this post.

And last, but not least, the multiple groups functionality is also present in OpenNebula 4.4 Retina, with the introduction of secondary groups. These work in similar way to unix groups: users have a primary group and optionally several secondary groups.

The team is now working to define the roadmap for OpenNebula 4.6. Stay tuned for new features!

Community

An interesting post was contributed by Gareth Bult, and it is a compulsory read for anyone interested in running OpenNebula over SSD disks. An interesting alternative was suggested, to “cache your storage on a local SSD, but hold your working copy on a remote server, or indeed servers.”

An amazing contribution by Deutsch Post in the form of an opennebula puppet module was published also last month in Github. This module allows to install and manage your OpenNebula cloud using the puppet platform.

We want to highlight the excellent contribution made by Terradue, in the form of an OpenNebula add-on. The jclouds4one driver implements new capacities for hybrid Cloud Computing, expanding OpenNebula’s support for Cloud Bursting, with the ability to work with a variety of up to 30 cloud providers & cloud software stacks, including Amazon, Azure, GoGrid, Ninefold, OpenStack, Rackspace, and vCloud. More information on this post created in our blog by the Terradue folks.

Moreover, the documentation system has been changed from DokuWiki to Sphinx, and it is now backed in Github. This allows to improve readability, create better PDF guides, and improve collaboration (via fork & pull request). We know that the documentation is as important as the code, so we want the community to be involved, guaranteeing its high quality.

Outreach

Awesome speakers render awesome talks, like the ones held at the OpenNebulaConf 2013 last September in Berlin. If you want to remember the great ambience of the conference, or if you haven’t got a chance to attend, here is your opportunity to (re)visit the knowledge shared in the conference in the form of recordings of the keynotes and talks. Also, you can check out the presentations of the speakers if you want to consult a particular detail that you do not quite remember. And, to make the experience even more immersive, scout through the conference pictures.

Last month C12G hosted the CentOS Dojo in its HQ in Madrid. It started with a OpenNebula tutorial given the previous day, and it displayed an array of very interesting talks, covering technical aspects related to OpenNebula and CentOS. Thanks a lot to the attendees to help render such a productive event!

Next year’s OpenNebula Conference will be held in Berlin as well, 2-4 of December, 2014. If you want to repeat or find out how it is for yourself, save the date!

This last month, a series of public training courses on OpenNebula Fundamentals, aimed to cloud administrators and operators, was given by members of the OpenNebula Team in the C12G headquarters in Madrid. The courses covered the process of installing, configuring and operating private, public and hybrid clouds using OpenNebula. Additionally the programs briefly addressed the integration of OpenNebula with other components in the data center. If you are interested in future public training courses, please check the C12G training web page.

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.