Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

The big news this month is the release of the OpenNebula 3.4 beta. This release is focused on extending the storage capabilities of OpenNebula, including support for multiple datastores. The use of multiple datastores provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations between storage servers, defining different SLA and QoS policies for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage.

OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other systems, especially in the core with the support of logic resource pools, the EC2 API with the support of elastic IPs, the Sunstone and Self-service portals with new cool features, and the EC2 hybrid cloud driver that now supports EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPCs.

As usual, the OpenNebula community has played an active role in shaping this release, and OpenNebula 3.4 includes contributions from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.

The final release of OpenNebula 3.4 is scheduled for Wednesday, April 11.

Community

Three new components were contributed to the OpenNebula ecosystem:

• The Cluster Energy Saving system (CLUES): An energy management system for High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters and Cloud infrastructures that supports integration with OpenNebula. The main function of the system is to power off internal cluster nodes when they are not being used, and conversely to power them on when they are needed. This component was contributed by the Grupo de Grid y Computación de Altas Prestaciones at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.
• A stable version of the Hyper-V drivers for OpenNebula. This latest release includes new features, such as direct connection to Windows Servers nodes without requiring a proxy machine, improvement of CDROM contextualization mechanism, and support for SCSI hard disks. These new components have been developed with the support of Microsoft.
• Green Cloud Scheduler: A scheduler that consolidates the virtual machines in the cloud such that as few servers as possible are used to run the current workload while the unused servers are shut down. This component was contributed by the Distributed Systems Research Laboratory of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.

Sebastien Goasguen’s team at Clemson University has worked on adding support for EC2-like Elastic IPs and Security Groups to OpenNebula. You can read more about it, including pointers to their code, in this blog post.

Qingye Jiang published a really interesting analysis of several open source cloud communities, including OpenNebula.

Finally, the cloud-b-lab blog has been publishing several tutorials on OpenNebula, including tutorials on VMWare, Windows XP, and Hadoop.

Outreach

We will be giving an intensive tutorial on basic and advance usage and configuration of the new OpenNebula 3.2.1 at the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC 2012) to take place in Nuremberg, Germany, on the 25th and 26th of April 2012. Preregistration for the workshop is needed.

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Outreach page. We have also created a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.