Last week, after receving a good amount of feedback, we’ve been planning the new features for OpenNebula 4.6. The primary focus for the next release is two-fold: federation and usability.

Federation of OpenNebula datacenters. oZones will undergo a major re-design (basically we are going to get rid of it ;)… and move its functionality to oned and Sunstone. This way, OpenNebula Zones will become a first-class citizens and it will be quite easy to federate your OpenNebula deployments. Virtual Data Centers, VDCs, will be also greatly improved: we are sure that they will prove to be a very useful tool to ease the multi-tenancy aspects of federated as well as stand-alone OpenNebula installations.

General usability improvements. In this area, there will not be radical new features in OpenNebula but rather minor adjustments to its current functionality. In particular, to highlight some of the new features:

• Storage Backends, support for RDB fomat 2 and improved support for GlusterFS.
• Virtual Networking, new operations to ease the update and management of virtual networks, as well as a clearer organization of IP assigment (including MAC-IP assigments and IP reservations).
• Datastores and Images, new operations to easily re-size and move/clone images.
• VM Management. New functions to simplify VM operation, provide attach/dettach operations on both running and non running VMs, or instantiate a template to a persistent VM.
• Sunstone, we will continue to polish its functionality and also, it will expose new dialogs for the new features (e.g. zone selector for users, resource providers for user groups…)

The OpenNebula Team would like to thank the community for this awesome list of feature requests. Even though not all the requests made it for 4.6., we are very excited to work on a release with a roadmap completely defined with functionality requested by OpenNebula users.

The complete list of features and planned bug fixes is here. Requests not planned for 4.6 have been moved to the project backlog.