Following the series of posts about the new OpenNebula 4.0 features, now it’s time to take a peek at the brand new Sunstone. OpenNebula 4.0 Sunstone has some beautiful new looks, but it’s not only about the external appearance  there has also been a major boost for the user experience by redefining the users workflow.

In this post we will show a few snapshots of some new Sunstone key features. The new wizard screen eases the task of creating and updating Virtual Machines. There’s also new functionality to update very easily existing resources using the extended info panel.

• Easily edit your existing resources using the extended info panel.

• When creating a new Virtual Machine template,  you will be able to filter and select your images with a single click.

• Select where you want your Virtual Machine to run on.

• Automatically add contextualization metadata to your Virtual Machines.

OpenNebula 4.0 will be available for testing, really soon. Until then, we will keep you updated with the new features in posts like this. You can also check the posts released last week about the Ceph integration and the new scheduling feature.

Stay tuned!

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel.

This screencast shows how easy is to import an appliance from the OpenNebula Marketplace to your local infrastructure using Sunstone.

Enjoy the screencast!

The OpenNebula Cloud offers a virtual computing environment accessible through two different remote cloud interfaces, OCCI and EC2, and  two different web interfaces,  Sunstone for cloud administrators and the new SelfService for cloud consumers. These mechanisms access the same infrastructure, i.e. resources created by any of the mentioned methods will be instantly available on the others. For instance, you can create a VM with the OCCI interface, monitor it with the EC2 interface, and shut it down using the OpenNebula Sunstone web interface.

This Cloud has been migrated to the last OpenNebula version, 3.4. If you have an account you can still use your old username and password. If not, request a new account and check out the new OpenNebula 3.4 features. These interfaces will show you the regular user view of the Cloud, but you will not be able to manage system resources such as ACLs, groups nor users; nor infrastructure resources such as hosts, clusters and datastores, since that will be delegated to the oneadmin group.

Operations upon this cloud will result on virtual networks and machines resource creations, but no real action whatsoever will be performed. This means that there will be the illusion that a VM is created, but in fact it won’t be running anywhere.

The OpenNebula driver in Deltacloud has been updated to interact with OpenNebula 3.x clouds. If you want to test it, there is a how-to available on the OpenNebula wiki that will show you how to interact with OpenNebula using Deltacloud. You can even test it using the OpenNebula Public Cloud.

We would like to thank Marios Andreou for his support.

A new Howto on enabling x509 certificates authentication with Sunstone has been included in the OpenNebula wiki

This guide shows how to enable and use x.509 certificates for authentication in OpenNebula Sunstone. In this configuration, the authentication is delegated to Apache, or any SSL capable HTTP Proxy. If the certificate is valid, the server encrypts those credentials and sends the token to OpenNebula.

Howto: http://wiki.opennebula.org/sunstone_x509

The OpenNebula Cloud offers a virtual computing environment accessible through two different remote cloud interfaces, OCCI and EC2, and  two different web interfaces,  Sunstone for cloud administrators and the new SelfService for cloud consumers. These mechanisms access the same infrastructure, i.e. resources created by any of the mentioned methods will be instantly available on the others. For instance, you can create a VM with the OCCI interface, monitor it with the EC2 interface, and shut it down using the OpenNebula Sunstone web interface.

This Cloud has been migrated to the last OpenNebula version, 3.2. If you have an account you can still use your old username and password. If not, request a new account and check out the new OpenNebula 3.2 features. These interfaces will show you the regular user view of the Cloud, but you will not be able to manage ACLs, hosts, groups nor users, since that will be delegated to the oneadmin group.

A new How-to has been included in the OpenNebula Community Wiki. This guide can be used to develop new drivers in order to interact with external Cloud providers in an OpenNebula Hybrid Cloud deployment.  Currently the OpenNebula distribution includes drivers to interact with EC2 to combine local resources with resources from EC2 .

Link:  How to Develop a New Driver to Interact with an External Cloud Provider

The OpenNebula Cloud offers a virtual computing environment accessible through two different remote cloud interfaces, OCCI and EC2, and through a web interface, OpenNebula Sunstone. These three mechanisms access the same infrastructure, i.e. resources created by any of the mentioned methods will be instantly available on the others. For instance, you can create a VM with the OCCI interface, monitor it with the EC2 interface, and shut it down using the OpenNebula Sunstone web interface.

This Cloud has been migrated to the last OpenNebula version, 3.0. If you have an account you can still use your old username and password. If not, request a new account and check out the new OpenNebula 3.0 features. These interfaces will show you the regular user view of the Cloud, but you will not be able to manage ACLs, hosts, groups nor users, since that will be delegated to the oneadmin group.

The OpenNebula Team is happy to announce the new OpenNebula IRC Sessions. In these sessions the OpenNebula developers will be available for questions in the #opennebula IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The developers will answer questions about the new features or development and configuration issues that cannot be found in the mailing list archive.

These sessions will usually be scheduled in the first week of each month.

First session: Monday, 9 May 2011, 15:00 UTC

The attendees will need an IRC client connected to irc.freenode.net and the #opennebula channel

An OpenNebula user, John Dewey, has just contributed a new oca rubygem that allows developers to make calls to OpenNebula’s Cloud API (OCA) from their Ruby projects without having to install OpenNebula. The Ruby OCA API has been designed as a wrapper for the XML-RPC methods to interact with the OpenNebula Core, with some basic helpers. This gem was built against OpenNebula 2.0 and will be updated in each release.

If you want to use it in your Ruby projects, you can install it by running the following:

$ sudo gem install oca

Here is a short example that shows how you can use this new oca gem from Ruby. More specifically, this program queries all the running VMs and shuts them down.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

###################################################################
# Required libraries
###################################################################
require 'rubygems'
require 'oca'

include OpenNebula

# OpenNebula credentials
CREDENTIALS = "oneuser:onepass"
# XML_RPC endpoint where OpenNebula is listening
ENDPOINT    = "http://localhost:2633/RPC2"

client = Client.new(CREDENTIALS, ENDPOINT)

vm_pool = VirtualMachinePool.new(client, -1)

rc = vm_pool.info
if OpenNebula.is_error?(rc)
    puts rc.message
    exit -1
end

vm_pool.each do |vm|
    rc = vm.shutdown
    if OpenNebula.is_error?(rc)
        puts "Virtual Machine #{vm.id}: #{rc.message}"
    else
        puts "Virtual Machine #{vm.id}: Shutting down"
    end
end

exit 0

We would like to thank John Dewey for this very useful contribution!