November 2013 Newsletter – Here’s our monthly newsletter, with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

OpenNebula 4.4 is in the oven, and the fumes of the beta can be already seen in the approaching horizon. A myriad of new features, bug fixes and general improvements are underway!

In the realm of cool features, we would like to highlight support for multiple system datastores, improved Open vSwitch integration, better xmlrpc concurrency, support for IP reservations and many other nice improvements. Monitorization is also being severely revisited, with an agent based approach that will turn the monitoring philosophy in OpenNebula from pulling to pushing (yay!).

Moreover, driver enhancements are also underway like for instance, improved EC2 support. Expect lots of new enhancements to the unique OpenNebula hybrid cloud model: switching to Ruby SDK instead of Java API tools, more robust and effective monitoring, etc. Also, support of EC2 API in OpenNebula to build public clouds will be greatly improved: snapshotting, tags and improved describes.

One of the most useful (and most difficult to implement, at the same time) features would be multiple group functionality, with an approach mimicking that of unix groups. Please check this blog post to get a peek on the upcoming feature.

Check the development portal for the full set of features and bugs to be dealt with for OpenNebula 4.4.

Also, to guarantee our commitment for previous versions support, a new version of the OpenNebula 3.8 series (Service Pack 2, 3.8.5) has been released, bringing even more stability to the 3 series.

Community

In an effort to achieve even more transparency and openness in the project, the OpenNebula Team has evaluated the feedback received in the OpenNebulaConf 2013 and rolled out a New Code Contribution Process. The Contribute Code page has been updated to describe the general processes of code contributions to OpenNebula:

• How to report a bug
• How to make a feature request
• How to contribute bug and feature patches
• How to contribute new functional components

Framed in this campaign, the OpenNebula add-ons were born as well this last month. Not being mature enough to be included in OpenNebula, these new add-ons would have required support for their enhancement and coordinated development to avoid redundant work. This initiative has been well received by the community, we are glad you liked it, we are looking forward for your contributions. So far we have the following add-ons contributed:

• iSCSI: Datastore driver for iSCSI
• AppMarket: Build a marketplace to share appliances between OpenNebula instances
• Ganglia:Information Manager drivers for Ganglia
• KVM SR-IOV Driver: Networking drivers to support SR-IOV devices, including Infiniband, in KVM virtual machines

Outreach

Awesome speakers render awesome talks, like the ones held at the OpenNebulaConf 2013 last month in Berlin. If you want to remember the great ambience of the conference, or if you haven’t got a chance to attend, here is your opportunity to (re)visit the knowledge shared in the conference in the form of recordings of the keynotes and talks. Also, you can check out the presentations of the speakers if you want to consult a particular detail that you do not quite remember. And, to make the experience even more immersive, scout through the conference pictures.

Next year’s OpenNebula Conference will be held in Berlin as well, 2-4 of December, 2014. If you want to repeat or find out how it is for yourself, save the date!

This past month a number of events were participated by OpenNebula project members or OpenNebula power users:

• Jornadas Técnicas RedIris, Hands-on Tutorial, Madrid, Spain. 21-22 October, 2013

A very interesting event to be held this month is the C12G organized CentOS dojo. This November 8th, in Madrid, Spain, a very good array of speakers (including CentOS director and OpenNebula developers) will shed light on OpenNebula, clouds and CentOS, at the C12G Labs HQs, following an OpenNebula tutorial given the previous November 7th.

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.