Check this Newsletter to find out the what kept us busy this month: latest developments, events and future plans for the upcoming months.

We would like to remind you that the third OpenNebulaConf is around the corner. If you haven’t already, register and meet us in Barcelona!

Technology

We have left summer behind, and are fastly approaching winter. The team has released the final stable version of OpenNebula 4.14 ‘Great A’Tuin’. Like leaves in fall, numerous features landed in this new release. You can check the exhaustive list of changes in the development portal.

The new ability to import VMs is worth highlighting from any supported hypervisors, including the hybrid ones. Have you got any Amazon VMs running and want to manage them through Sunstone? No problem! you can have OpenNebula aware of them in a breeze through the import dialog. We have prepared a screencast showing this feature, check it out, you won’t be disappointed!

4.14 includes the ability to manage disk snapshots. You can attach a disk to a VM, create a snapshot, detach it and attach it to a new VM, and revert to a previous state. This is useful to a variety of scenarios, for instance, before a system upgrade. If unsure how the management is offered through Sunstone, take a couple of minutes to check this video.

GPU support is now available to give raw access through PCI passthrough to specially calculation hungry VMs, like those found in HPC environments. There is no overcommitment possible nor sharing of GPU devices among different Virtual Machines, so a new type of consumable has been defined in OpenNebula and taken into account by the scheduler.

Great A’Tuin comes packed with features. And when we say packed, we really mean it! image resizing on boot time, ability to save VMs into VM Templates for later use, better state management of VMs, flexible context definition of network attributes, the possibility to cold attach disks and network interfaces to powered off machines (which complement the hot attach functionality), improvements in accounting to keep track of disk usage, better logging in several areas,… and many more.

We want to thank our community for the excellent feedback on this important release, packed with features. It is of the utmost importance to fine tune OpenNebula, so thanks! now is time to upgrade your OpenNebula instance, and provide feedback in case you find any bug, to help us deliver a quality maintenance release, 4.14.1. Several organizations have sponsored the project through the Fund a Feature Program: disk snapshots with Ceph backend was funded by Unity, Qcow2 snapshots implementation was funded by BIT.nl, GPU devices support was funded by SURFsara and flexible network attributes definition in contextualization was funded by Université Catholique de Louvain.

The team is also working on a new version of vOneCloud, based on 4.14 and with extra features for vCenter management. It will bring significant advances in guest customization options. Stay tuned!

Community

September is a good month for our engaged community, with lots of different contributions that give value to the project.
Contributions that widens the OpenNebula ecosystem are always welcome, and show the good health of the OpenNebula open source project. For instance, the Saturn OpenNebula driver that enables OpenNebula to use Saturn -a scalable iSCSI block storage- as the storage backend for a persistent block device datastore.

Moreover, a project for integrating OpenNebula and Kerberos are also very good news. This will help securing OpenNebula deployments with the network authentication protocol, the team will evaluate this integration for its inclusion in future releases.
Besides technology contributions, it is also rad to see OpenNebula power users and their awesome deployments. Like this one we recently learned about: a new HPC cloud cluster, aimed at unravelling the mysteries of the Oort Cloud, powered by your favourite Cloud Management Platform. Cool, isn’t it?

The project also runs on messages like this one. Very happy to make possible important HPC infrastructures for our users. Keep it up! Little hacks on how to make OpenNebula resemble your ideal system are also very well received, like this mini howto on how to change the Sunstone login page background by CESGA. Way to go! We hope you are as comfortable using OpenNebula as we are developing it.

Our partners also make important contributions to the project, like this tweet by Microsoft Azure advertising the OpenNebula 4.12 Sandbox present in the Azure marketplace, lowering the barrier in case you want to try out OpenNebula features and also its powerful hybrid drivers.

Outreach

The upcoming third edition of the OpenNebulaConf will be held in Barcelona this October 2015. The Conference is a great opportunity to meetup and share your OpenNebula experiences with the community. We would like to take this opportunity to also thank our Platinum Sponsors PTisp and StorPool; Gold Sponsors ungleich, Xen Server and NodeWeaver; and Silver Sponsors Runtastic and No Limit Network. Your company may be interested in the sponsorship opportunities for OpenNebulaConf 2015, but make it quick, time is running out!. If your company is interested, you can apply with this form.

The agenda for the OpenNebulaConf 2015 is available, check out the high quality speakers. The agenda includes two keynote speakers:

• Karsten Nielsen from Unity Technologies will give a keynote about how they apply the KISS approach to their federated infrastructure using OpenNebula.
• Armin Deliomini from Runtastic will tell us the story of their way to transition their private cloud from small to larger scale.

Moreover, the OpenNebula Conf has been included in the “Top 47 SysAdmin Events and Conferences in 2015 and 2016” by ProfitBricks. If you are willing to attend, there is still time to purchase a ticket.

The OpenNebula Conf will be co-located with an edition of the CentOS Dojo Barcelona 2015. The event will take place from 13:30 to 18:30, Tuesday October 20th, in the Hotel Barceló Sants, same place as the OpenNebula Conf will.

An OpenNebula Workshop, delivered by our friends at ungleich, will happen next 8th of November. If you live in Switzerland, or happen to be around, make sure you do not miss it!

During the following months, members of the OpenNebula team will be speaking in the following event:

• VMworld Europe, Barcelona, Oct 12, 2015

If you are interested in receiving OpenNebula training, check the schedule for 2015 public classes at OpenNebula Headquarters. Next public OpenNebula training will take place next 15th of December in Madrid. Please contact us if your would like to request training near you.

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.