What’s New in OpenNebula 6.4

OpenNebula 6.4 ‘Archeon’ is the third stable release of the OpenNebula 6 series. The most exciting addition to ‘Archeon’ is the ability to automatically deploy and manage Edge Clusters based on Ceph—the powerful open source software-defined storage solution. This new native hyperconverged infrastructure architecture can be deployed on-premises (just minimal OS and SSH access is required) and also on AWS bare-metal resources, which gives your hybrid OpenNebula Cloud great flexibility. And, of course, you can dynamically add more hosts to your cloud whenever you need, as well as seamlessly repatriate your workloads from AWS at any time. You’ll be able to test these new features in our Beta 2, but we promise it’s worth the wait! 🤩

This Beta 1 comes already with a fully-functional new Sunstone interface for managing VM templates and instances, with a similar coverage in terms of features as the traditional Cloud View present in the earlier version of Sunstone, save for the OneFlow integration. If you are a cloud admin, please keep using the ruby-based Sunstone interface (port 9869) but encourage your end-users to migrate to the new Sunstone portal served in port 2616. Our development team has worked hard to streamline the functionality offered in the VM and VM Template tabs, and more UX improvements are on the way, so stay tuned! The old, ruby-based interface also received its share of love, adding all the functionality that OpenNebula incorporates in this new version 6.4.

This new release is also going to include the notion of network states, which will be available in Beta 2. Your virtual networks will have states that will allow you to perform custom actions upon the creation and destruction of instances, offering better integration with your datacenter networking infrastructure. Events changing the state of your virtual networks can be tied to the execution of hooks to further tune the behavior of your cloud. There are two components that benefit from this change: OneFlow can now synchronize the creation of virtual networks and service VMs, while vCenter networking does not require any longer the activation of a hook.

There are also a number of additions to the supported hypervisor family, like the new SR-IOV support for the NVIDIA GPU cards and the addition of fine-grain resource control to the LXC driver. The integration with vCenter has also been improved, including the support for filtering and ordering those resources to be imported, the automatic VM Template creation for marketplace appliances, and the ability to set a default prefix for VM names, among others. Performance-wise, the vCenter driver is now more robust in large scale deployments, optimizing memory usage.

OpenNebula 6.4 is named after the Archeon Nebula, located in the Lothal sector of the Outer Rim Territories—a beautiful body of interstellar clouds where stars are born and which provides a popular hyperscape route for smugglers traversing the continuum towards the edge of the Star Wars universe 🤓

The OpenNebula team is now transitioning to “bug-fixing mode”. Note that this is a first beta release aimed at testers and developers to try the new features, and we welcome you to send feedback for the final release. Please check the known issues before submitting an issue through GitHub. Also note that being a beta, there is no migration path from the previous stable version (6.2.x) nor migration path to the final stable version (6.4.0). A list of open issues can be found in the GitHub development portal.

We’d like to thank the people that supports the project, OpenNebula is what it is thanks to its community. Apart from the usual acknowledgments, we’d like to highlight the support we’ve got through the EU-funded H2020 project ONEedge 👏

🚀 Download OpenNebula 6.4 and give it a whirl!