The OpenNebula team has released the first beta version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0 next September. OpenNebula 2.0 Beta 1 is targeted at testers and users that would like to peep at what’s coming to their clouds!. OpenNebula 2.0 beta includes a significant amount of changes and new features in many areas, bringing the most flexible, scalable and feature rich Cloud Toolkit to the Free Software community. OpenNebula 2.0 is the result of a close collaboration with our user community to address their scalability, flexibility and security requirements in large-scale production systems.

This new release will break compatibility with OpenNebula 1.4 (at DB and API levels), therefore we’ve decided to follow a larger release cycle to make a smooth transition period, and also to stabilize API‘s and internal data models for the new components.

What is new in OpenNebula 2.0 Beta1

• Image Repository. The Image Repository allows users to easily specify disk images from a catalog without worrying about low-level disk configuration attributes or block device mapping. Also, image access control is applied to the images registered in the repository, hence simplifying multi-user environments and image sharing. The traditional method of specifying VM disks is also fully supported. More info…

• MySQL support. OpenNebula can work now with MySQL or Sqlite DBs backends. The new MySQL support brings important performance and scalability improvements compared to the Sqlite implementation. MySQL is the recommended option for large-scale clouds. More info…

• Scalability Improvements. Several components of OpenNebula have been tuned to work with tens of thousands of VMs, including the redesign of the scheduler and adjustments to the monitoring modules.

• Cluster support. Physical hosts can now be grouped in logical clusters, so after a cluster is defined it can be then used to set the placement of a VM. More info…

• Authorization & Authentication Drivers. The authorization and authentication processes in OpenNebula have been totally redesigned. Now they can be handled natively by the OpenNebula core, offering the same functionality as OpenNebula 1.4. Alternatively, the A&A processes can be handled by an external component that can be integrated with any A&A system or user maps (e.g. LDAP, Kerberos…). As an example OpenNebula 2.0 features a quota based authorization module and user authentication based on RSA keys. More info…

• Virtual Networking Improvements. OpenNebula 2.0 lets you define generic attributes associated to a a Virtual Network (e.g. gateway, dns servers…) that can then be included in the context of a VM. This will let you easily configure VMs with multiple NICs. Additionally Virtual Networks can now be defined as public, and thus shared among multiple users.

• Improved EC2 support. The EC2 Query server can now be used with the EC2 ecosystem, supported third party applications include ElasticFox or EucaTools. More info…

• Java Bindings for the OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) OpenNebula 2.0 includes JAVA bindings that wraps the XML–RPC interface methods exposed by the core. More info…

Relevant Links

• Download OpenNebula 2.0 Beta1!
• Release Notes
• OpenNebula 2.0 Feature List
• Documentation for OpenNebula 2.0
• About OpenNebula