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

Technology

A new version of your favourite Cloud Management Platform has been released, with version number 4.2, and codename Flame. This OpenNebula release includes a more polished Sunstone interface, with important usability enhancements. It also includes a new view for cloud users, designed to offer a minimal portal for virtual resource consumption. Datastore capacity is now monitored and used to limit the amount of storage size used by images, this being the first step to control the runtime storage used by the VMs.

The VMware backend has been completely redesigned with a more comprehensive storage scheme, more functionality and less dependencies. Also we have upgraded the Xen backend to support the new interfaces introduced in Xen 4.0. These will enable the use of new Xen features like VHD images and a more tight HVM integration. And last but not least, OneFlow, the multi-tier application (a.k.a. service) manager, it is included and fully integrated in the distribution. It includes also important new features related to service management and elasticity/auto-scaling. You can find more information on the release notes.

Moreover, be sure to check out our screencasts, showing cool new features sported by Flame.

Finishing touches are being applied to the testing process, which is being revised as well, with a strong focus in extending it to cover the new functionality developed in OpenNebula, including integration with third party components. This ensures the stability of this OpenNebula release, as well as future ones.

Community

The community has been as active and vibrant as ever. We would like to give a warm welcome in our ecosystem to the OPTIMIS toolkit, which is fundamentally a cloud-enabling technology that ultimately allows users to schedule and automate the delivery of workloads to the most suitable venues (internal or external) based on policies such as trust, risk, eco-efficiency and cost.

A really special cloud was set up by folks at Citrix and Linaro, based on ARM processors virtualizing using Xen. This is probably the tiniest cloud ever! Check out the awesome demonstration carried out by Stefano and Julien.
Folks at inovex are prepping a Rex.io plugin for OpenNebula, enabling access your OpenNebula Cloud from within Rex.IO. We would like to thank them, so far the development looks very promising.

Also worth mentioning that now, thanks to our community, we have a perl binding for OpenNebula’s native xmlrpc interface. Big thanks, Jan Gehring!

Outreach

We want to remind you about the First OpenNebula Conference. The Conference, based in Berlin between the 24 and 26 of september, will serve as a meeting point for OpenNebula cloud users, developers, administrators, builders, integrators and researchers and a unique opportunity for discussion and collaboration with other projects.

The first OpenNebula Conference will deliver its educational content through 6 keynotes, 2 tracks with 18 regular talks, 1 hands-on tutorial and 3 community sessions (see this page for more details).

• Keynotes speakers include Daniel Concepción from Produban – Bank Santander Group, Zhihong Zhang from China Mobile, Steven Timm from FermiLab, André von Deetzen from Deutsche Post E-Post, Jordi Farrés from European Space Agency, Karanbir Singh from CentOS Project, and Ignacio M. Llorente and Rubén S. Montero from the OpenNebula Project.
• The talks are organized in three tracks about user experiences and case studies, integration with other cloud tools, and interoperability and HPC clouds and include speakers from leading organizations like CloudWeavers, Terradue, Akamai, NetWays, INRIA, BBC, inovex, AGS Group, Hedera, NetOpenServices, KTH, CESNET or CESCA.
• The Hands-on Tutorial will show how to build, configure and operate your own OpenNebula cloud.
• The lightning talks, hacking and open space sessions will provide an opportunity to present lightning talks, discuss burning ideas, and meet face to face to discuss development.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available, and you can check the conference page for full details about registration.

Check out this nice presentation about OpenNebula for the private cloud given by Valentin Bud in the Cloud Computing Event #1, at Timisoara, Romania, this past 7th of July.

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team will be speaking in the following events:

• Ceph Community Day in NY, “OpenNebula & Ceph”, NYC, US, 1st August
• ISC Cloud’13, Hands on Tutorial, “Building your Cloud for HPC, here and now, in 3 hours!”, and an invited talk, “Cloud Architectures for HPC – Case Studies”, Heidelberg, Germany 23-24 September.
• EGI Technichal Forum, Keynote and OpenNebula booth, Madrid, Spain. 16-20 September
• An interesting series of tutorials on interoperability by OpenNebula, CloudStack, OpenStack will be carried out at the Cloud Interoperability Week, at Santa Clara, USA, 16-18 September, and Madrid, Spain, 18-20 September.

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