A year ago OpenNebula Systems published the VMware Cloud Reference Architecture, a blueprint to guide IT architects, consultants, administrators and field practitioners in the design and deployment of public and private clouds based on OpenNebula on top of VMware vCenter. This reference architecture is intended for organizations with existing VMware environments or expertise who want to limit changes to their underlying VMware infrastructure, but see benefits in a common provisioning layer via OpenNebula to control compute workloads and want to take a step toward liberating their stack from vendor lock-in.

Many things have changed since that document was published. This is a brief summary of what’s new and ready for you:

• OpenNebula now allows to upload, clone and delete VMDK files.
• VM importing workflow has been greatly improved through Sunstone, making it easier to import your existing workload into OpenNebula.
• Resource pools defined in vCenter are supported by OpenNebula so available memory and CPU can be partitioned. When launching a VM from OpenNebula, a resource pool can be selected automatically or the user can choose one.
• When a VM is instantiated from a VM Template, the datastore associated can be chosen. If DRS is enabled, then vCenter will pick the optimal Datastore to deploy the VM.
• New disks can be hot-plugged and OpenNebula can be informed from erasing the VM disks if a shutdown or cancel operation is applied to a VM, so users won’t lose data accidentally.
• Support for vCenter customization specifications, as a complementary alternative to contextualization.
• Multi vCenter cluster can be now defined in a single VM Template definition.
• Control how disks are managed in vCenter, through the KEEPS_DISKS_ON_DONE template variable which will help you to protect users data against accidental deletions.
• Datastores in a Storage DRS can be used as individual datastores by OpenNebula.
• A bandwidth limit per VM network interface can be applied. VM’s network usage information is now gathered from vCenter.
• It’s possible to access the OneGate server from vCenter VMs since the onegate token is passed through to the VM.
• And last but not least, cool features added to Sunstone: a smoother vCenter’s resource import, the Cloud View functionality has been extended, new tags for resources.

This blueprint has been created from the collective information and experiences from hundreds of users and cloud client engagements so your feedback is extremely valuable.

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More features are continuously being added, OpenNebula is a project in constant evolution, so stay tuned and do not forget to send us your feedback!