OpenNebula 4.4 Detailed Features and Functionality

This section describes the detailed features and functionality of the latest version of OpenNebula (v4.4) for the management of private clouds and datacenter virtualization(*). It includes links to the different parts of the documentation and the web site that provide extended information about each feature. We also provide a summarized table of key features.

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Powerful User Security Management

Advanced Multi-tenancy with Group Management

On-demand Provision of Virtual Data Centers

  • A Virtual Data Centers (VDC) is a fully-isolated virtual infrastructure environment where a group of users, under the control of the VDC administrator, can create and manage compute, storage and networking capacity
  • Support for the creation and management of multiples VDCs within the same logical cluster and zone
  • Advanced multi-tenancy with complete functionality for management of VDCs: create, delete, show…

Advanced Control and Monitoring of Virtual Infrastructure

Complete Virtual Machine Configuration

Advanced Control and Monitoring of Physical Infrastructure

Broad Commodity and Enterprise Platform Support

  • Hypervisor agnostic Virtualization Subsystem with broad hypervisor support (Xen, KVM and VMware), centralized management of environments with multiple hypervisors, and support for multiple hypervisors within the same physical box
  • Storage Subsystem with support for multiple data stores to balance I/O operations between storage servers, or to define different SLA policies (e.g. backup) and performance features for different VM types or users
  • Storage Subsystem supporting any backend configuration with different datastore types: file system datastore, to store disk images in a file form and with image transferring using ssh or shared file systems (NFS, GlusterFS, Lustre…), LVM to store disk images in a block device form, Ceph for distributed block device, and VMware datastore specialized for the VMware hypervisor that handle the vmdk format and with support for VMFS
  • Flexible Network Subsystem with integration with Ebtable, Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging
  • Virtual Router fully integrated with OpenNebula to provide basic L3 services like NATting, DHCP, DNS

Distributed Resource Optimization

  • Powerful and flexible requirement/rank matchmaker scheduler providing automatic initial VM placement for the definition of workload and resource-aware allocation policies such as packing, striping, load-aware, affinity-aware…
  • Advanced requirement expressions with cluster attributes for VM placement, affinity policies, any host attribute for scheduling expressions, and scheduler feedback through VM tags
  • Powerful and flexible requirement/rank matchmaker scheduler for storage load balancing to distribute efficiently the I/O of the VMs across different disks, LUNs or several storage backends
  • Resource quota management to allocate, track and limit computing, storage and networking resource utilization
  • Support for cgroups on KVM to enforce VM CPU usage as described in the VM Template

Centralized Management of Multiple Zones

High Availability

Community Virtual Appliance Marketplace

  • Marketplace with an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula cloud environments
  • Marketplace is fully integrated with OpenNebula so any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click through familiar tools like the SunStone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI

Management of Multi-tier Applications

Gain Insight into Cloud Applications

Hybrid Cloud Computing and Cloud Bursting

Standard Cloud Interfaces and Simple Self-Service Portal for Cloud Consumers

Rich Command Line and Web Interfaces for Cloud Administrators

Multiple Deployment Options

Easy Extension and Integration

Reliability, Efficiency and Massive Scalability

(*) Because OpenNebula leverages the functionality exposed by the underlying platform services, its functionality and performance may be affected by the limitations imposed by those services.

  • The list of features may change on the different platform configurations
  • Not all platform configurations exhibit a similar performance and stability
  • The features may change to offer users more features and integration with other virtualization and cloud components
  • The features may change due to changes in the functionality provided by underlying virtualization services