We want to let you know about what we are up to with the main news from the last month regarding the OpenNebula project, including what you can expect in the following months.

Technology

With OpenNebula 4.6 Beta released, the team is working full throttle ironing out wrinkles: fixing bugs, polishing the interface, prepping the documentation, updating related components and applications, etc. It is a lot of work, but we want our users to experience a migration as smooth as possible.

One of the main contributions of this new release is a big boost to the provisioning model. Besides the Sunstone interface facelift, including tweaks to help the user workflow, there has been a number of provisioning ideas developed in this release. For instance, Sunstone integration with marketplace has also been improved in order to support the new AppMarket version, which makes even easier for a user to get a virtual application up and running. Moreover, the provisioning model has been greatly simplify by supplementing user groups with resource providers. This extended model, the Virtual Data Center, offers an integrated and comprehensive framework for resource allocation and isolation.

The latest addition to the provisioning model improvement is the new provisioning view for cloud end users. This view ensures a minimal and utterly simple portal to consume cloud resources. All the clutter is out of the way to make the experience as pleasant as possible. Give it a spin!

The other significant features that will be present in OpenNebula 4.6 includes the ability to achieve a federation using OpenNebulas (yes, plural is coming!) at different datacenters. Check out the screencast on partitioning clouds with vDCs to get a feel on this new functionality. Also, 4.6 will feature the ability to import OVAs into OpenNebula via AppMarket, and will be a complete translation and import of all the resources defined in the OVA: disks, capacity, network, etc. Other aspects that are being revisited are storage backends, virtual networking, datastore, image and VM management and Sunstone. You can find a comprehensive list here.

Some of the above features have been sponsored by Produban in the context of the Fund a Feature program.
Another technology contribution by OpenNebula members is summarise in this post about integrating puppet and OpenNebula: Automatic configuration of VMs with Puppet. Moreover, integration with GlusterFS (a distributed filesystem with replica and storage distribution features that come really handy for virtualization), was also addressed in the Native GlusterFS Image Access for KVM Drivers post.

Community

This month the community was as engaged as ever. We would like to give a big “thank you” to all the OpenNebula users that gave as feedback about the beta version of OpenNebula 4.6. The final release will be more robust due to you!

Our friends at BIT (this month they hosted the very first OpenNebula TechDay, check the Outreach section of this newsletter 😉 ) wrote a very long and flattering (cheers!) post stating their experiences with OpenNebula. We would like to highlight in this newsletter the following excerpt:

The OpenNebula way of developing software is open, and user focused, The “voice” of the community really matters. The cliche “software made with and for the community” really applies here. If users get (positive) feedback about their input they feel appreciated and be more “connected” to the project. The “atmosphere” on the mailing list is friendly and open. No flame wars, or negativism here, so it keeps users “in” instead of pushing them away.

So we blush! We are glad that our users feel this atmosphere, which is the main driver of the OpenNebula project 😉

Folks at CloudWeavers build this slick portable DC based on OpenNebula. Awesomely pretty!

Outreach

As usual, first things first, this 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!

Following last month series of comparing OpenNebula with other similar projects, we published a new post comparing the balance between user base and community in both the OpenStack and OpenNebula projects. Check it out, it is an interesting read.

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!. The first TechDay happened in Ede, Netherlands, and was hosted by BIT, a dutch internet service provider. You can read about the aftermath here.

There will be two OpenNebula TechDays in the upcoming months in the USA, covering both the east and the west coast. The one in Florida will take place in Boca Raton the 19th of June, hosted by TransUnion, whereas the west coast will be covered by the Bay Area Techday the 24th of June, hosted by Hyve, which includes an exciting tour around the manufacturing plant of Facebook production racks.

This month, the OpenNebula team participated in the Cloud Expo Europe 2014. As part of the Open Cloud Forum sessions about open source cloud solutions, there was an OpenNebula tutorial. Also, OpenNebula was present at the biggest IT fair in the world, the CeBIT 2014, were we hanged out the Netways booth. Our partners, Netways, represented OpenNebula in the FLOSS UK 2014.

And, last but not least, our project director travelled to Greece for the Future Internet Assembly 2014, with a presentation aiming to show how OpenNebula is driving innovation in cloud computing, impacting the adoption of private cloud, and enabling business in the cloud.

The following events are happening this month, with the participation of an OpenNebula team member:

• Closer 2014, Barcelona, Spain, Apr 3-4, 2014.
• LOADays, Apr 7,Antwerp, Belgium.
• Open Nebula: La realidad del trabajo en la nube, Apr 9, Almendralejo, Spain.

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

• EGI Community Forum, Helsinki, Finland, May 19, 2014.
• HostingCon, Miami Beach, Florida, Jun 16-18 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.

There are still available seats for the LOADays in Belgium, register now!.