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

Technology

It’s been a very exciting (and busy) month for the OpenNebula team with the release of the OpenNebula 3.6 beta, and several related goodies. OpenNebula 3.6 features a new hotplug mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. We have also re-written the Quota and Accounting tools from scratch. Quota and Accounting are now included in the OpenNebula core, which enhances their integration with the existing authorization and authentication mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone).

OpenNebula 3.6 also features improvements in other systems, especially in Sunstone’s interface with the redesign of several tabs. Make sure you check out all the screenshots we published recently on our blog. If you want to try it out, just head over to the OpenNebula Demo Cloud, which we recently updated to OpenNebula 3.6 Beta.

Stay tuned for the stable release of OpenNebula 3.6: it is scheduled for July 9th.

We also announced a first public beta of the new OpenNebula Marketplace, an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula clouds. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click. The OpenNebula marketplace is also of interest to software developer looking to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.

In this first beta, users could only download existing appliances from the public catalog and access specific information of the appliance configuration. A few days ago, we released a new version that allows users can easily post and share their own appliances. OpenNebula 3.6 is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the Sunstone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI.

Finally, after releasing a Sandbox Appliance for VMware, we recently did the same with KVM. We also published some interesting articles on OpenNebula for large scale deployments and why OpenNebula is the solution for private cloud computing.

Community

Earlier this month, we heard how FutureGrid, a testbed providing users with grid, cloud, and high performance computing infrastructures, uses OpenNebula for image management in Cloud/HPC environments.

Three current European Union projects, SCI-BUS, SHIWA and EDGI, have organized a Summer School revolving around Cloud and Grid computing. A whole day is devoted to cloud computing where students are trained on how to build and use cloud systems. For this day, the organizers selected OpenNebula because of its widespread use in European projects.

We have a new contribution to the OpenNebula ecosystem: one-ovz-driver, a driver that adds support for OpenVZ as a hypervisor in OpenNebula. Thanks to Dariusz Chrząścik, Marta Ryłko, Radosław Morytko, and Marcin Jarząb at Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza for this contribution!

Our list of featured users keeps growing, and we recently added several new users, such as Dell, Liberologico, Impetus, OnGrid

Finally, one of the benefits of having a truly international community is that several users have been able to contribute partial and complete translations of OpenNebula’s user-facing interfaces. We recently started using Transifex to help us manage these translations, and we have launched a call for translations. The existing translations can be updated and new translations submitted through our project site at Transifex. The process is very simple: just create a Transifex account (or login with using your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google or Facebook account) and you’ll be able to translate individual strings from English to your native language.

Outreach

This summer, members of the OpenNebula team will be participating in several Cloud events:

• CloudOpen 2012, Linux Foundation, San Diego, USA, August 29-31, 2012
• FrOSCon 7, Bonn, Germany, August 25-26, 2012
• 13th Libre Software Meeting, Geneva, Switzerland, July 10, 2012
• Helix Nebula General Assembly, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, July 5 and 6, 2012
• EU-Japan Co-operation Forum on ICT, Berlin, Germany, July 3rd, 2012

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

This last month, we participated in several cloud events, including Clouds for Europe: From Cloud-friendly to Cloud-Active, and Matchmaking in the Cloud. Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Outreach page. We have also have a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.