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

Technology

Following our rapid release cycle, a pre-release of OpenNebula 3.4 is now available. This pre-release solves minor issues in several OpenNebula components and includes some new features, specially in Sunstone and in the cloud servers (EC2 and OCCI). For a more detailed list of changes, take a look at the release notes. The final release of OpenNebula 3.4 will feature multiple data-stores and several new back-ends for storage. Some of this is already in the repository although it has not been included in this pre-release. We will be releasing OpenNebula 3.4 Beta on the 16th of March… so stay tuned!

We released a new version of the OpenNebula drivers to build clouds on Microsoft Hyper-V. The main aim of this new release is to enhance the performance and scalability of the drivers and to simplify its deployment by leveraging technologies commonly available in Windows environments, like Windows Remote Management. This release also updates the drivers to work with the latest stable version of OpenNebula (3.2). You can find more technical details in the Hyper-V page of the OpenNebula ecosystem. The release of this new driver was announced in CloudScape IV and a final version of this drivers will be released in few weeks.

The OpenNebula driver in Deltacloud has been updated to interact with OpenNebula 3.x clouds. If you want to test it, we added a Howto to our wiki showing how to interact with OpenNebula using Deltacloud, and you can also test it with the OpenNebula Public Cloud.

We added some new documentation resources that may be of use to some of our users:

• A new Howto on enabling x509 certificates authentication with Sunstone to the OpenNebula wiki
• A new episode to our screencast series in the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This new screencast demonstrates our new easily-customizable Self Service portal for cloud end-users (distinct from Sunstone, which is intended for cloud administrators).

Community

The big news in the community this month was that OpenNebula will be part of the Helix Nebula partnership, a consortium of leading IT providers and three of Europe’s biggest research centres (CERN, EMBL and ESA) launching a European cloud computing platform to enable innovation for science and to create new commercial markets. In the science research area, OpenNebula is used by the leading supercomputing centers, research labs, and e-infrastructures to build and manage their own cloud computing systems.

During this month we also updated our list of contributors to include people from FermiLab, Harvard, Sandia Labs, CERN, IBM, Logica, Puppet, RIM, and many others (if your name is missing from the list, please contact us). We also added several companies and projects to our list of featured users: CITEC, LibreIT, Tokyo Institute of Technology, CloudWeavers, IBERGRID, MeghaCloud, NineLab, ISMB , RENKEI, BrainPowered… If you would like to be added to the list, please take a moment to fill out our OpenNebula User Survey

We have recently received an important contribution from Research in Motion: they have contributed new image/transfer drivers for qcow2 and multiple datastores, which will be part of the upcoming OpenNebula 3.4.

Fedora 17 Alpha has been released featuring OpenNebula 3.2.1 (thanks to Shawn Starr), and the OpenNebula package in Debian has been updated to 3.2.1 (thanks to Damien Raude-Morvan).

Valentin Bud organized a Cloud Computing and OpenNebula workshop in Timisoara, Romania, on February 16th. Valentin is hoping to organize more workshops like this so, if you live in Romania, make sure you follow his workshop Facebook page.

Finally, we would also like to point out that there was recently a very interesting thread in our user mailing list where the gurus of the of the community exchanged their experiences when using different storage subsystems: GlusterFS, GPFS, Lustre, MooseFS, XtreemFS…

Outreach

CloudScape IV was an opportunity to present how OpenNebula is helping to unleash the innovation of cloud computing and to see the wide adoption of OpenNebula in leading international projects working in cloud computing innovation and interoperability in the area of research infrastructures. Projects like VenusC, BonFIRE, EGI, or StratusLab presented their use of OpenNebula, and how its standard APIs are helping them to offer interoperability and portability to their consumers.

FOSDEM was a great opportunity to get feedback from the community, and to meet with the people behind the projects we collaborate with, Deltacloud, CompatibleOne, Xen Cloud Platform, ….

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.