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

Technology

OpenNebula 3.8 Twin Jet has just been released, check out the release notes for release highlights and a summary of the new features incorporated in OpenNebula 3.8.

OpenNebula 3.8 enhances the integration with VMware and KVM, which are the most widely used hypervisors in OpenNebula clouds, and with heterogeneous infrastructures using multiple hypervisors. Twin Jet features an improved storage VMware interface with native support for VMFS and integration with cgroups and SPICE on KVM deployments. This new version seamlessly integrates with the new Virtual Router in the OpenNebula marketplace to provide L3 services based on the OpenNebula virtual networks.

Twin Jet also enhances the EC2 Query API server, which now provides a complete implementation of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) and keypairs, along with other minor enhancements to be more compliant with the Amazon EC2 specification. The OCCI cloud API now brings new actions and hotplugging functionality.

An effort was also carried out to come closer to the popular linux distributions, the new packages for  3.8 distributed by the OpenNebula team for each supported distribution will be the same as the packages contained in the linux distros.

One of the changes introduced in OpenNebula 3.8 is the new contextualization packages The new version comes with some changes that we hope will make people creating images happier.

There is also worth emphasizing the aspects that makes OpenNebula the platform of choice for the enterprise cloud. In a nutshell: it is a production ready software, easily integrated with third party tools and with unique features the management of enterprise clouds.

Community

An interesting study was published by C12G Labs, resulting from a survey among 820 users with a running OpenNebula cloud. The results state that  43% of the deployments are in industry and 17% in research centers, KVM at 42% and VMware at 27% are the dominant hypervisors, and Ubuntu at 31% and CentOS at 26% are the most widely used linux distributions for OpenNebula clouds.

As member of the OpenNebula community, China Mobile has posted their work on how does it take to deploy 100 virtual machines using a single instance of OpenNebula, and the answer is less than 5 minutes! The post is very interesting since it shows the configuration that China Mobile has set in their OpenNebula cloud to achieve this very nice results.

Another awesome contribution to the OpenNebula ecosystem was described by Research in Motion, giving a detailed description of the features and architecture of Carina. The Carina project was motivated by the need to speed up the deployment of services onto the OpenNebula private cloud at RIM,  it is a successful attempt to standardize the process for automating multi-VM deployments and setting auto-scaling and availability management policies in the cloud.

We want to give a big two thumbs up to our community for their amazing contributions to OpenNebula 3.8. We can highlight contributions by China Mobile, Research in Motion, Atos, FermiLab, CentOS and many others. OpenNebula’s Development Portal provides more details about the specific contributions. We would also like to thank all the people that have contributed translations for Self-Service and Sunstone, as well as to Bill Campbell, the author of the nifty integration of OpenNebula and Ceph, with a set of TM/DS/VMM scripts. Moreover, kudos to SZTAKI LPDS for the enhancement in the iSCSI drivers, focused to achieve higher reliability and stability while working with iscsi datastores with TGT server.

Outreach

There’s been a lot of coverage in the media of OpenNebula. We’ve created a page to keep track of the OpenNebula apparitions in the press. This month, OpenNebula was featured in the following publications:

• Oct 28, 2012: This Week in Cloud: Big Outages, OpenNebula Updates, Yottabyte Debuts by Barb Darrow in GigaOM
• Oct 24, 2012: OpenNebula 3.8 improves hypervisor support by Dj Walker-Morgan in The H
• Oct 16, 2012: A Truly Open Cloud Has to Be Open Source, Says OpenNebula by Mathew Ingram in GigaOM
• Oct 11, 2012: OpenNebula Survey Shows Industry Use Dominating by Dj Walker-Morgan in The H
• Oct 10, 2012: OpenNebula Cloud — Bigger than Expected in Business by Barb Darrow in GigaOM
• Oct 5, 2012: 7 reasons why Europe really matters to cloud computing by Derrick Harris in GigaOM

This past month a number of events were participated by OpenNebula members:

• GigaOM Structure:Europe, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 16-17, 2012 (video recording available).

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

• LinuxCon Europe 2012, Barcelona, Spain, November 5-7, 2012
• BeLUG, Berlin Linux User Group, Berlin, Germany, November 28th, 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. 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.

The new C12G training program is also relevant for OpenNebula users and administrators, covering OpenNebula public and private training classes. The courses span across 3 days, and cover the fundamentals of the OpenNebula cloud manager platform.

Also this month, C12G Labs disclosed the OpenNebula Jumpstart packages, designed to help new customers springboard their productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks through professional assistance with initial set-up, configuration, support and knowledge transfer.