OpenNebula 4.0 is getting prepared, the team is finishing the new shiny features and the beta release is just a few weeks away. Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

A very active month for OpenNebula, with several big news.

A major change has occurred in the OpenNebula release process, with C12G announcing that every OpenNebula maintenance release and service pack will be made publicly available at the community site. From release 3.8 onwards, the OpenNebula community will enjoy the benefits of the OpenNebulaPro distribution including the C12G’s Quality Assurance processes. Which is really good news! The OpenNebula distribution will benefit from a more up to date, quality software.

The Team is focused on the upcoming 4.0 release. An important number of bugs are being wrinkled out, and several and relevant features are being worked upon. You can follow the progress from the development portal.

In a nutshell, the upcoming OpenNebula 4.0 will come with a revamped Sunstone interface (stay tuned for this! screenshots may leak shortly in your favorite cloud management platform twitter account and in this blog), core enhancement with audit trails, additions to virtual machine lifecycles (like the “hold” state), the ability to create disk snapshots, which comes in very handy for the day to day service management, as well as support for RBD block devices.

A groundbreaking milestone has been reached with the open-source release of the OpenNebulaApps, a suite of tools for users and administrators of OpenNebula clouds to simplify and optimize multi-tiered application management. The new software has been released under Apache license and will be incorporated into the main distribution of OpenNebula, bringing state-of-the art service management (among other nice features) to the OpenNebula community.

It is also worth to highlight the apparition of the OpenNebula cloud OS architecture in IEEE Computer, with description of its different components, discussing the different approaches for cloud federation

Community

There have been a number of community contributions to OpenNebula during this last month. A very valuable contribution was made by Nicolas Agius as a new ecosystem component, the Clustered Xen Manager (CXM) drivers for OpenNebula. These TM and VMM drivers allow the use of cLVM datastores on a pool of XEN hypervisors. It also brings high-availability and load-balancing to the hosted VM using the CXM.

Another outstanding contribution by Ricardo Duarte is the econe metadata server, which enables VM contextualization for OpenNebula clouds the same way it is done in the Amazon EC2 environment.

Moreover, support for OpenNebula in rexify (a popular server configuration management tool) has been added, enabling virtual machine deployment and contextualization using rexify in OpenNebula clouds.

We would like to thank the numerous people that provided feedback, either through the development portal or the user mailing list, with bug reporting, patches for bug fixing and the intense testing. OpenNebula community, healthy as ever!

Outreach

A relevant post has been written in GigaOM about the open-source release of the OpenNebula Apps components with Apache license.

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team or people deeply familiar with the technology will be speaking in the following events:

• FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, Belgium, February 2 and 3, 2013
• CeBIT, Hanover, Germany, March 5-9, 2013
• FlossUK, Managing Enterprise Clouds with OpenNebula, March 20 and 21, 2013

If you will be attending any of these events and want to meet with a member of the OpenNebula team, drop us a line at contact@opennebula.org. 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.