As most of you already know, the development team here at OpenNebula has been pretty busy these last few months… Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to:

• OpenNebula 6.0 “Mutara” included a new node.js server called FireEdge, the GUI for the OneProvision tool. It can be used to easily scale up an OpenNebula cloud by automatically provisioning additional resources using cloud/edge infrastructure providers like AWS and Equinix Metal. Pretty cool, right?
• OpenNebula 6.2 “Red Square” came with a technology preview of a new incarnation of the good ol’ Sunstone, the web interface that exposes all the power of an OpenNebula cloud and helps admins and end-users manage physical and virtual resources.

We’ve just launched the Beta release of OpenNebula 6.4 “Archeon”, which already offers most of the VM and VM Template functionality, so you can manage the full life cycle of VMs including resizing, hotplug operations, and everything you are used to doing in the current Sunstone interface.

Why the Change?

Well, time is not a forgiving fellow. The current Sunstone is based on technologies that, although serving their purpose very well for many years, are starting to show their age. Thin server, jquery, handlebars… are all starting to build up a significant technological debt after more than a decade. They’ll be missed 👋

What’s New Then?

The OpenNebula Front-end Team is now focused on porting all the functionality to the new Sunstone—which we affectionately call “FireEdge Sunstone”. Our goal for OpenNebula 6.4 has been to provide a fully functional VM Template and Virtual Machine tab. This includes some goodies, like a revisited Guacamole and VMRC integrations, improved pool handling, slick card interface, better error reporting… in short, a lot of new stuff. And this is just the beginning! 🤓

What’s Next?

Now that OpenNebula 6.4 is out, we will focus on making sure that new versions incorporate all the current Sunstone functionality. And once that is in place, the real party will begin. Having a new code base which can be maintained and extended far more easily will enable much faster development work in the new Sunstone. So, the team will shift focus and concentrate on improving the overall User Experience.

What will this entail? Well, we haven’t got as far as to completely plan all the changes, and obviously, we expect our Community to send us some feedback in the meantime, but here we’ll give you some hints:

• improved error reporting, probably using a vCenter-like console for task/error display.
• better federation support, with console access to remote VMs.
• filtering resources to present only options that are relevant, never performing an operation that is not supported.
• … the sky’s the limit! 🚀

So, now it’s up to you to try the new FireEdge Sunstone, and let us know what you think about OpenNebula’s new graphical user interface! 📡