Since January 2024, OpenNebula has been working on ONEnextgen, its individual project within IPCEI-CIS/8ra, the €3 billion European initiative focused on next-generation cloud infrastructure and services. After 30 months of intensive and disruptive innovation, the first phase of the project is now coming to an end.

This first phase has been driven by a set of ambitious technical requirements for next-generation cloud infrastructure, addressed through six-month development cycles and validated through practical demonstrations based on challenging use cases. Each cycle has produced new capabilities that are now being incorporated into the OpenNebula 7 series, the foundation of OpenNebula Next Generation.

During this final semester, the work has focused on intelligent orchestration of distributed infrastructure and specialized resources. To showcase these innovations in action, we have prepared a new series of technical screencasts demonstrating how OpenNebula enables workload portability, confidential infrastructure services, energy-aware orchestration, and distributed Kubernetes operations across heterogeneous cloud-edge environments.

These capabilities are already shaping the OpenNebula 7 series, including the upcoming 7.2.1 and 7.4 releases, and will provide the basis for the next phase of IPCEI-CIS. This new phase will apply the results to demanding scenarios, with a particular focus on sovereign enterprise cloud environments and AI Factories, while also preparing the ground for future disruptive AI infrastructure capabilities as part of the upcoming IPCEI-AI.

1. Distributed Confidential Infrastructure Services

This screencast demonstrates secure file sharing between two Nextcloud instances deployed on independent cloud providers across two European sites. Running OpenNebula federation, it shows how confidential workloads can move private data over a common storage and networking layer, encrypted at rest with server-side encryption and in transit over a WireGuard mesh, across the edge–cloud continuum.

Key Highlights

• OpenNebula federation across multiple providers
• WireGuard encrypted overlay networking
• AES-256 server-side encryption
• Federated Nextcloud file sharing
• Validation of encrypted storage and encrypted traffic.

2. Portability Across ARM-Based Edge Nodes with Limited Resources

This screencast demonstrates the live migration of a lightweight workload between two Raspberry Pi 5 edge nodes. Running OpenNebula with native ARM64 support, it shows how lightweight applications can remain portable and resilient even on resource-constrained edge hardware, maintaining service continuity with minimal disruption.

Key Highlights

• Native ARM64 support in OpenNebula
• Live migration across Raspberry Pi 5 edge nodes
• Lightweight KVM virtualization
• Portable edge workloads with minimal downtime
• Shared datastore orchestration for live migration.

3. Portability Across 5G and Edge Nodes

This screencast demonstrates the automatic provisioning of two distributed Sylva workload clusters using different Kubernetes flavours on top of OpenNebula as IaaS, and the portable deployment of a 5G private network on top of them. This setup illustrates how users can achieve the portable and distributed deployment of 5G/Edge Nodes.

Key Highlights

• OpenNebula as infrastructure provider for distributed edge environments
• Sylva-compliant cloud-edge architecture
• Automated Kubernetes provisioning
• Portable deployment of Open5GS and UERANSIM
• Distributed 5G private network deployment.

4. Portability Across High-Performance Edge Nodes

This screencast demonstrates the portable deployment of an AI inference workload across two high-performance edge nodes. A vLLM appliance from the OpenNebula Marketplace, serving an OpenAI-compatible API, is migrated from a first HPC node to a second HPC node, with the system disk and model weights transferred together with the workload, so the same endpoint resumes serving the same model with no client reconfiguration and minimal service interruption.

Key Highlights

• AI inference portability across HPC edge infrastructure
• vLLM appliance deployment from the OpenNebula Marketplace
• EuroLLM serving through an OpenAI-compatible API
• Portable AI workloads using qcow2 system disks
• Stable overlay networking during migration.

5. Orchestration Techniques to Minimize Energy Consumption

This screencast showcases energy-aware orchestration techniques across the cloud-edge continuum through real-time energy metrics and workload-level observability. Developed together with the GreenShift project, the demonstration combines hardware telemetry with runtime metrics collected from Kubernetes and virtualized environments. The system enables granular energy attribution across workloads, tenants, and services to support greener infrastructure operations.

Key Highlights

• Real-time energy monitoring across distributed infrastructure
• Workload-level energy attribution
• Integration between OpenNebula and GreenShift
• Energy-aware orchestration techniques
• Support for sustainability and CSRD reporting.

6. Distributed Kubernetes Deployment Across Multiple Edge Nodes

This screencast demonstrates distributed Kubernetes lifecycle management across heterogeneous infrastructure managed by OpenNebula. Using OneKS, elastic Kubernetes clusters are provisioned across both on-premises and cloud-edge infrastructure locations from a single OpenNebula deployment. The demonstration showcases cluster provisioning, elastic scaling, and workload deployment across distributed infrastructure environments.

Key Highlights

• Distributed Kubernetes lifecycle management with OneKS
• Unified orchestration across on-premises and edge infrastructure
• Placement-aware Kubernetes provisioning
• Elastic worker-node scaling
• Hybrid cloud and edge Kubernetes operations.

Advancing the European Cloud-Edge Continuum

Together, these demonstrations showcase how OpenNebula supports:

• Secure and confidential infrastructure services
• Portable workloads across ARM, edge, and HPC environments
• Distributed Kubernetes lifecycle management
• Automated 5G and telco cloud deployments
• AI inference portability across heterogeneous infrastructure
• Sustainable and energy-aware orchestration.

These capabilities contribute to the development of open, sovereign, interoperable, and sustainable infrastructure technologies for the cloud-edge continuum.

Watch the demonstrations and learn more about the project at ONEnextgen.eu and IPCEI-CIS/8ra.

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