The OpenNebula team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the final version of OpenNebula 4.8, codename Lemon Slice. This release brings significant improvements in different aspects. Sticking with our vision of bringing simplicity to cloud management, there are improvements in the recently added Cloud View portal, designed for end users. One significant advantage of the new portal is the ability to control flows, groups of interconnected Virtual Machines that conform a service. Based on this Cloud View, a Virtual Datacenter administrators view has been included (VDCAdmin View), which enables VDC admins to easily manage the VDC users and resources.

An important highlight in this release is the vast improvement made to the hybrid model. Support for two new public cloud providers has been added, widening the range of possibilities to offload VMs in case the local infrastructure is saturated. The hybrid model in OpenNebula enables a centralized management of both local and remote resources for the cloud administrator, and a transparent consumption of these resources for the end user. With these two new additions, namely support for Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer, OpenNebula is increasing the possibilities to build powerful, robust, cost and performance efficient cloud infrastructures across administrative domains and public cloud providers.

The OneFlow component also has been improved, specially OneGate, making sharing service information among VMs possible. Flows are now easier than ever to build and consume, since details like the virtual network the flow are going to use are defined later by the user, so the administrator doesn’t have to deal with all the possible combinations. Moreover, Virtual Networks underwent a thorough redesign. Definition of virtual networks are no longer restricted to the fixed and ranged model, but rather they can include any combination of ranges to accommodate any address distribution. Moreover, end users can now reserve a range or IP addresses for their own use at a later time.

Finally, several improvements are scattered across every other OpenNebula component: improvements in quotas management, multi boot available through Sunstone, availability of Windows contextualization packages, new raw device mapping datastore, better Ceph drivers, possibility to clone images across datastores …. ladies and gentlemen, you are in for a treat.

This is a stable release and so a recommended update. It incorporate important improvement since 4.6 and several bug fixes since 4.8 Beta. Be sure to check the compatibility and upgrade guides. We invite you to download it and to check the QuickStart guides, as well as to browse the documentation, which has also been properly updated. 

As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Lemon Slice nebula (IC 3568)  is a planetary nebula that is 1.3 kiloparsecs (4500 ly) away from Earth in the constellation of Camelopardalis. It is a relatively young nebula and has a core diameter of only about 0.4 light years.

The new features for Cloud View and VDCAdmin View introduced in OpenNebula 4.8 were funded by Produban in the context of the Fund a Feature Program. The new feature that redefined virtual networks in OpenNebula 4.8 were funded by BlackBerry in the context of the Fund a Feature Program.