OpenNebula features unique functionality for virtualization of the datacenter. Among them, it is worth highlighting its support to build cloud bursting architectures where private cloud resources can be easily supplemented with resources from a remote public cloud to meet fluctuating demands. The reason behind this uniqueness is the transparency to use and maintain the cloud bursting functionality for both end users and cloud administrators.

The latest version of OpenNebula, Carina, offers a simple but comprehensive framework that enables resource allocation to different groups of users in federated data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. OpenNebula offers a single management point for both local private and remote public cloud resources, with an end user self-service portal (Cloud View) that enables the consumption of hybrid virtual machine templates. These hybrid templates are intended to define identical virtual machines -in terms of provided service- whether they get deployed in the local infrastructure using local resources, or if the scheduler decides to deploy them remotely in a public cloud provider.

So far the only public cloud officially supported by OpenNebula to build hybrid cloud deployments is Amazon AWS. During the last months, several of our main users have demanded support for other commercial providers to be able to manage workloads across different clouds. Driven by this user demand, we have started discussions with the main public cloud providers in order to collaborate with them in their integration with OpenNebula. Supporting multiple public cloud providers would open the possibility of defining pre-determined schedule or performance-based policies for the execution of applications in different clouds, that can be fine tuned to achieve an optimal placement in terms of performance and cost. This support will also enable the ability to meet services constraints regarding special functionality offered by a subset of the supported public cloud providers, like for instance high availability.

 

We are really excited to announce that C12G Labs has started a collaboration with IBM in order to develop a new hybrid plugin for the Softlayer cloud. IBM Softlayer is providing support and technical guidance to OpenNebula open-source project to add and maintain Softlayer in the list of officially supported public clouds. Softlayer adoption is rising fast and its support to build OpenNebula-based hybrid clouds is highly demanded by some of our biggest users. The results of this collaboration will be incorporated into the OpenNebula distribution under the Apache license and, as such, it will be available freely to the public. The OpenNebula team will start forging the integration in a few days and are planning to incorporate a first version of the integration in the next release of OpenNebula scheduled for July 2014.

This collaboration consolidates OpenNebula’s position as the open-source platform of choice in the converged data centre, providing a simple, albeit flexible and powerful, cloud manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover; the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of modern enterprise clouds; and connectors for external clouds.

Need more information? You are welcome to use the OpenNebula community instruments to ask around (for instance, the users mailing list is a good place to pose your questions). Moreover, if you are in the US this June, you can register in the upcoming OpenNebula TechDay events in Boca Raton, Florida, on June 19th, hosted by TransUnion|TLOxp—global leader in information and risk management—and in Fremont, California, on June 24th, hosted by Hyve Solutions, a leader in providing large scale deployments and an original Open Compute solutions provider.

This is excellent news for the OpenNebula Community!