We are excited to share that OpenNebula 7.4 “Helix” is officially live! While earlier releases pushed the boundaries of infrastructure scale, 7.4 turns the spotlight toward maximizing operator efficiency, delivering a fully modernized UI, and deepening automation across enterprise and AI-centric environments.

A Redesigned User Interface

The core interface has been thoroughly revamped following a comprehensive usability overhaul. Key upgrades include:

• Refined Visual System & Navigation: A clean visual layout with an updated color palette, scalable typography, and reorganized settings for intuitive navigation.
• Item Exploration via Side Drawer: Inspect VMs, Hosts, and Virtual Networks instantly in a slide-in drawer without losing your context or place in the workflow.
• Richer Resource Visualization: Surfaces key details upfront, reducing the need to search through tabs for resource status and relationships.
• FSaaS (VirtioFS) Support in GUI: Manage shared storage file systems, create filesystem images, and attach disks directly within Sunstone.

Streamlined Enterprise Workloads & Automation

• Enhanced Kubernetes Provisioning (OneKS): Streamline container orchestration with multi-cluster configuration options and pre-deployment diagnostics designed to catch errors before provisioning failures occur.
• OneSwap Batch VMware & Windows Migrations: Accelerate your transition away from legacy hypervisors with automated, bulk VMware migration capabilities. Includes new Windows OS profiles and template best practices for seamless Windows conversions. 
• Advanced OneDRS Datastore Selection & Storage Migrations: OneDRS now supports storage migrations across datastores in addition to Host migrations when optimizing cluster workloads. Administrators can also set ONEDRS_BLOCKED=YES to exclude specific VMs from automatic migration. 
• Dynamic VM Group Management: Manage VM groups dynamically directly through the CLI, increasing flexibility for multi-tier application architectures.
• Bulk Service VM Operations: Perform bulk deletions of scheduled actions across all service VMs, drastically reducing manual administrative overhead.

High-Performance Networking & Multi-Tenancy

• VLAN Group-Level Authorization: Delegate VLAN management directly to tenants, enabling secure Virtual Network self-provisioning in multi-tenant environments.
• Open vSwitch with Switchdev Mode: Native support for SR-IOV-capable PCI network interfaces running in Switchdev mode with Open vSwitch, unlocking maximum network performance for demanding workloads.
• KVM Dummy Interfaces & Guest Agent Monitoring: Support for dummy interfaces allows VMs to run guest NICs unattached to OpenNebula Virtual Networks. QEMU Guest Agent monitoring now supports OS/architecture filtering and network info gathering. 

Next-Tier Backup & Storage Management

• Expanded Backups via OneBEX: Leverage the OpenNebula Backup Exporter (OneBEX) to remove heavy Veeam integration storage requirements. Third-party tools can interactively pull CBT incremental changes directly on qcow2 and LVM-based disks.
• Selective Disk Backups: Choose specific VM disks to include in Backup Jobs rather than backing up the entire VM, with the ability to restore them as individual disks. 

Expanded AI & Hardware Acceleration

• Axelera AI Accelerator Integration: OpenNebula now supports the integration and lifecycle management of Axelera AI accelerators, enabling their allocation to virtual machines for AI inference and edge AI workloads.

OS Support & OneApps 7.4 Update

Coinciding with this milestone, OpenNebula Apps (OneApps) 7.4.0 brings major enhancements to the appliance library:

• Native AArch64 for OneKS: Full ARM64 architecture support for the OneKS service appliance.
• Alpine 3.24 Base: Refreshed underlying OS packages across the entire appliance fleet.
• GPU-Ready Slurm Clusters: Quickly launch AI/HPC clusters featuring out-of-the-box NVIDIA GPU support and native LDAP identity integration.
• Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon): Production-grade packages ready for Ubuntu 26.04 deployment.
• Under-the-Hood Polish: Targeted stability tweaks across High Availability (HA), networking, monitoring, storage, and vCenter interoperability.

AI Factory Subscription: Advanced Ecosystem Extensions

Building on the existing native integrations with NVIDIA networking and fabric technologies, including Spectrum-X, BlueField DPUs, and NVSwitch, the following specialized AI Factory integration is also available:

• Automated AI Factory-Scale BMaaS (NVIDIA NICo): Native integration with the NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller (NICo) delivers automated Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS) and seamless lifecycle orchestration (DPU provisioning, firmware validation) for GPU-heavy environments.

Ready for the Future Stack

OpenNebula 7.4 “Helix” merges refined daily usability with deep hardware-level orchestration. Whether managing private cloud infrastructure or constructing a sovereign AI platform, 7.4 delivers the tooling required for modern IT ops.

• Check the Release Notes for the full list of features and improvements.
• Try OpenNebula 7.4 and begin your upgrade.
• Join our Community and share your feedback on our Forum.

The future of open cloud and AI infrastructure is here. Welcome to OpenNebula 7.4.