VMware hypervisors of the ESX family (3.x, 4.x and 5.0) are fully, out-of-the box supported by the latest versions of OpenNebula(3.0+). If you have a server farm based on any of the ESX versions, then you can make use of OpenNebula to better manage your physical (and virtual) resources in order to build a private cloud and provide virtualized environments. OpenNebula is the most powerful open-source alternative to VMware datacenter and cloud suite, delivering enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability with broader platform support and integration capabilities.

So, what can you do with OpenNebula to improve the experience managing your VMware hypervisors? A little taste in the following bullets:

• Manage multiple storage backends. You can have multiple storage sources (datastores) serving the same host, or you can group your hosts in clusters served by different storage servers. For instance, you can have the “Fast deployment” cluster and the “Better I/O” cluster, the former served by a shared filesystem and the latter by a ssh based datastore. Scheduling policies can be adjusted per VM to better use your resources.

• Manage virtual networks. OpenNebula ships with network drivers that allows for an automatic management of VMware port groups. In this fashion isolated, VLAN based virtual networks can be managed through OpenNebula and operated by VMware hypervisors.

• Virtual Machine (VM) lifecycle management. All the states of the VMs can be manipulated from OpenNebula: submit, stop, resume, cancel, shutdown, restart.

• Powerful GUI. Sunstone provides a window to both your physical (ESX farm) and virtual infrastructures. VMware resources can be managed through a web browser. Hello, Linux!

• Complete private cloud API. Manage your physical and virtual resources through OpenNebula rich native API. Script your tasks to automate everyday operations.

• Access your virtual resources running on top of ESX hypervisors through public cloud APIs: Amazon EC2 (de facto standard) and OCCI (de jure standard).

• Offer access to their virtual resources to your end users via a neat GUI: OpenNebula Self-service.

• Cloudbursting. Offload your services’ peak demands to a public cloud provider.

• Enjoy multi-tenancy on your virtual resources. Use Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) to isolate your computing resources to be used by members of different entities. Manage multiple OpenNebula instances in a centralized dashboard: oZones GUI.

• Role based user management. Manage permissions of your users regarding physical and virtual resources. Fine tune permissions using Access Control Lists.

• External authorization modules. Use your in-house LDAP or Active Directory user base to authorize virtual resources. No need to replicate this information in OpenNebula, it will pull the information for you.

Thus, OpenNebula is a good choice to manage ESX servers, and comes with many other goodies. For instance, it is compatible (simultaneously) with servers using other virtualization platforms, like for instance XEN and/or KVM. Also, you will be using a flexible platform that fits into your environment, and an open solution (so avoiding vendor lock-in), based on standards and interoperable with other private and public clouds.

The OpenNebula project is in the process of creating a new Marketplace component. Users will be able to use this Marketplace to download Virtual Machine Images that will boot directly with OpenNebula.

In the meantime we have uploaded a few images available for download to give users an idea of what’s about to come: http://appliances.c12g.com

Enjoy!

Members of the OpenNebula team will participate in the Open Source Business Conference 2012 to be held in San Francisco the 21 and 22 of May, 2012. During the week, they will also participate in several meetings in the Bay Area and give some invited talks at various organizations, like NASA Ames.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in having a meeting there!

We have published a new screencast featuring OpenNebula 3.4. The screencast starts with a pristine installation of OpenNebula 3.4 and creates a new VM from scratch by implementing the following steps using OpenNebula’s  Sunstone:

• Bootstrapping the Virtual Infrastructure
  • Creating a host
  • Creating a datastore
  • Creating a network and a user
• Creating a Virtual Machine from scratch
  • Registering a CD
  • Registering an empty image
  • Creating an installation template
  • Installing
  • Deploying the VM
  • Test-driving the VM

The most relevant pages of the documentation one should refer to after watching the screencast are:

• What is a Datastore?
• Contextualizing Virtual Machines
• Managing Virtual Machine Images
• Creating Virtual Machines
• Managing Virtual Machines

You can also download the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) VM that was created during the screencast from http://appliances.c12g.com/ubuntu-server-12.04/.

C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of OpenNebula. OpenNebula 3.4, released one month ago, features enhancements in several cloud subsystems, like support for multiple datastores, resource pools, elastic IPs in the Amazon API, improved web GUIs, and better support for hybrid clouds with Amazon EC2. Some of these improvements were contributed by several members of the OpenNebula community, such as Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.

OpenNebulaPro is used by corporations, research centers and governments looking for a hardened, certified, long-term supported cloud platform. OpenNebulaPro combines the rapid innovation of open-source with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks. Compared to other commercial alternatives, OpenNebulaPro is an adaptable and interoperable cloud management solution that delivers enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability at significantly lower costs.

OpenNebulaPro is provided under open-source license to customers and partners on an annual subscription basis through the OpenNebula.pro Support Portal. The subscription model brings several additional benefits in terms of long term multi-year support, integration and production support with professional SLAs, regular maintenance releases, product influence, and privacy and security guarantee, and all at a competitive cost without high upfront fees. C12G Labs also offers professional services to help at any stage of cloud computing adoption with OpenNebula.

C12G offers a 30-day, no-cost, and no-commitment trial of OpenNebulaPro with the services to assess its suitability and performance in your environment.

Here’s our monthly newsletter with the main news from the last month, including what you can expect in the coming months.

Technology

The big news this month is the release of the OpenNebula 3.4 (including a maintenance release, OpenNebula 3.4.1). This release is focused on extending the storage capabilities of OpenNebula, including support for multiple datastores. The use of multiple datastores provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations between storage servers, defining different SLA and QoS policies for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage.

OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other systems, especially in the core with the support of logic resource pools, the EC2 API with the support of elastic IPs, the Sunstone and Self-service portals with new cool features, and the EC2 hybrid cloud driver that now supports EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPCs.

As usual, the OpenNebula community has played an active role in shaping this release, and OpenNebula 3.4 includes contributions from Akamai, Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.

And now that OpenNebula 3.4 is out, we have updated our public cloud to 3.4.

But that’s not all! We will be releasing our first sprint of the 3.6 release cycle soon, including more community contributions, such as the resched command contributed by Research in Motion.

Community

We are happy to announce that the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will feature OpenNebula 3.2.1. We would like to thank Damien Raude-Morvan for maintaining the Debian package and Fabrice Coutadeur for helping us with the sync request, and the friendly people from #ubuntu-devel in Freenode for helping us out every time we asked. Fedora 17 Beta “Beefy Miracle” was also recently released with OpenNebula.

We have a new contribution to the OpenNebula ecosystem: Onenox, an extension of the OpenFlow controller NOX so that it can be called directly by the econe server of OpenNebula. Advanced network services can be enabled by onenox by pushing new rules set onto the Open vSwitch of a cloud infrastructure. Onenox is used to implement the well known Amazon services Elastic IP and security groups.

Rutgers University is building a solar-powered data center that will use an energy-aware version of OpenNebula called GreenNebula.

A team in Engineering (partially funded by Venus-C) have released a tool, ovf4one, which provides an OCCI interface that accepts OVF and provisions resources through the OpenNebula OCA interface.

We recently received new language contributions for OpenNebula Self-Service, our end-user web interface: fr_FR and fr_CA. As happy as we we were to receive these contributions, it was too late to include them in the official OpenNebula 3.4 release.

The cloud-b-lab blog continues to publish some excellent tutorials on OpenNebula, including a recent one on installing OpenNebula 3.4 and VMware ESX 4.1.

Outreach

This month, we gave an intensive tutorial on basic and advance usage and configuration of OpenNebula 3.2.1 at the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC 2012) in Nuremberg, Germany, on the 25th and 26th of April 2012. Make sure to check out our blog post of the event, including slides.

OpenNebula will be holding a presentation on the LinuxTag Conference 2012, which will take place from the 23rd to the 26th of May in Berlin, Germany. The presentation is on Wednesday 23rd, at 11:00 in the London room.

Our Project Director (Ignacio M. Llorente) will participate at OSBC 2012 in San Francisco the 21 and 22 of May and will spend the rest of the week in the Bay Area attending some meetings and giving talks in several locations like NASA Ames. Send us an email to contact@opennebula.org if you are interested in meeting with Ignacio.

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Outreach page. We have also created a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.

The European Commission has just published a report entitled Advances in Clouds – Research in Future Cloud Computing where a Group of Experts provides a state-of-the-art view on cloud computing technologies, its position in and its relevance for Europe. The Group of Experts was conveyed in 2011 and includes representatives from major Cloud players, like IBM, NEC, Google, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France Telecom, Oracle, British Telecom, or T-Systems. The report brings valuable information for people defining Cloud Computing strategies, developing innovative research lines, or exploring emerging market opportunities beyond today’s Clouds.

The report features OpenNebula as one of the most widely used platform to build cloud infrastructures, and elaborates on OpenNebula and OpenStack as open cloud managers addressing different types of cloud needs, and implementing different distribution models and interoperability strategies. Both, OpenNebula and OpenStack, deliver fully open-source software to build IaaS clouds, released under Apache license, and developed with an open and transparent process over the Internet. However, the report highlights relevant differences between both projects:

• While OpenNebula offers a comprehensive solution for data center virtualization management, enabling the users to easily build their own private and hybrid clouds, OpenStack mainly serves the needs of public service providers, focusing on AWS-like public cloud features.
• OpenNebula is delivered as a single integrated package comprising key functionalities for cloud computing with a single install, whereas OpenStack delivers a set of products for individual functionalities and capabilities.
• OpenNebula is committed to implementing major de-facto and de-jure standards, such as Amazon APIs, or the specifications by OGF, DMTF and SNIA. OpenStack builds loosely up on AWS, but primarily incorporates its own standardization working group, trying to incorporate the requirements from the participating companies.

Clearly, different open-soure cloud management tools will coexist and fit together in a broader cloud ecosystem.

The OpenNebula project announces the general availability of OpenNebula 3.4.1. This is a maintenance release that fixes bugs reported by the community.

This release includes bug fixes and is a recommended update for everyone running any 3.x. It also includes some new languages for Sunstone and the Self-Service portal.

Check out the OpenNebula 3.4 release notes for the release highlights and a summary of the new features incorporated in OpenNebula 3.4.

OpenNebula Software Downloads

This weekend we were at OSDC 2012 giving a presentation about OpenNebula as a solution for virtualization in Data Centers, giving a view of the feature set of OpenNebula under different perspectives: the Cloud consumer, the Cloud provider (or Cloud administrator) and the perspective of the Cloud integrator. Also, a one day workshop on how to install, configure, use and customize OpenNebula was given. The slides are uploaded to slideshare:

We are happy to announce that the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will feature OpenNebula 3.2.1.

We would like to thank Damien Raude-Morvan for maintaining the Debian package and Fabrice Coutadeur for helping us with the sync request, and the friendly people from #ubuntu-devel in Freenode for helping us out every time we asked.

Enjoy!