We are dwelling deep into 2014 now, we want to let you know about what we are up to in this new year with the main news from the last month regarding the OpenNebula project, including what you can expect in the following months.

Technology

The OpenNebula team is currently carefully crafting the next release of OpenNebula. As 4.6 is in the oven, we want to share with you some of the new features we are implementing for this new release. Probably the most stunning highlight would be the deprecation of the oZones component, with all its features being now implemented directly in OpenNebula, being them in the core or in Sunstone. This is a twofold process.

First, the VDC functionality is being assimilated within groups. Administrators would have the ability to assign Resource Providers (clusters, in essence) to certain groups, so its members will only have access to the resources defined in a certain cluster (or clusters). This feature will come with the ability to define an administrator group, with members able to create users within the regular group. Permissions of the regular and administrator group can be finely tuned at the time of creation.

The second aspect of oZones that is being embedded into OpenNebula is zone management. An OpenNebula Zone is basically an OpenNebula instance. We are taking this management a step further in this release, with the ability to set up a OpenNebula federation. This federation will be at the user and permission level, and will allow users to log in into their local Sunstones and being redirected to another zone if they are in a group with a Resource Provider added from that zone. Pretty neat, right?

Another cool feature that will be present in 4.6 is the ability to import OVAs into OpenNebula. The functionality is being implemented in AppMarket, and will be a complete translation and import of all the resources defined in the OVA: disks, capacity, network… even with the ability to change the disks format. There are a myriad of bug fixes and other minor features being worked upon as well. Other aspects that are being revisited are storage backends, virtual networking, datastore and image management, VM management and Sunstone. You can find a comprehensive list here.

Community

The OpenNebula community is relentless. During this few days of 2014, we have received a good deal of feedback in the mailing list which was very useful to define our roadmap. Check out the feedback in case you want to help defined the roadmap of future releases, OpenNebula’s features are driven by its users needs, which ensures its wide functionality and also working quality.

The addon catalog has a new neighbour: VDC store – caching storage infrastructure, by Gareth Bult. This module provides an interface to VDC-Store which is an alternative storage infrastructure for OpenNebula, providing a shared platform with support for local SSD caching, replication, live migration, snapshots and compression. There is also an ongoing integration between OpenNebula and IBM’s Softlayer. This is good news for OpenNebula users interested in building a hybrid cloud to extend their private data center with Softlayer resources.

We are also glad to know that OpenNebula is widely used in Spain. This kind of contradicts the otherwise universal truth: “The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot.” It is very interested to know as well, via Carlo Daffara, that “Half the real estates agencies of Italy use back end services powered by @opennebula”. He says, and he indeed knows.

OpenNebula web page has been completely redefined, in order to make it more community oriented (and, of course, more visually appealing!). The documentation has been also migrated to a sphinx, and the code uploaded to a public repository on GitHub, easing community contributions to a key component of OpenNebula. There are other contributions (like this networking hack) which makes our community awesome. Lots of kudos to you, keep up the good work, we will hold on tight to our end!

Outreach

First things first, 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! We are setting up a number of OpenNebula TechDays around the world. These events are designed to learn about OpenNebula with a hands-on cloud installation and operation workshop, and presentations from community members and users. If you are interested in hosting or sponsoring one, let us know!. Stay tuned for the first TechDays announcement, it’s happening soon. The following event is happening today, with the participation of an OpenNebula team member:

• CentOS Dojo/Fosdem 2014, Brussels, Jan 31, 2014

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team will be speaking in the following events:

• CloudScape VI, Brussels, Feb 25 , 2014
• Cloud Expo Europe, London, Feb 26, 2014
• Future Internet Assembly, Athens, Mar 18, 2014
• CeBIT 2014, Hannover, Mar 10-14, 2014
• Closer 2014, Barcelona, Apr 3-4, 2014
• EGI Community Forum, Helsinki, May 19, 2014
• GigaOM Structure, San Francisco, Jun 18, 2014

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.