OpenNebula 3.4 Key Features and Functionality
This section describes the key features and functionality of the last version of OpenNebula (v3.4) for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid (cloudbursting) clouds. It also includes links to the different parts of the documentation and the web site that provide extended information about each feature.
Powerful User Security Management
- Secure and efficient Users and Groups Subsystem for authentication and authorization of requests with complete functionality for user management: create, delete, show…
- Special authentication mechanisms for SunStone (OpenNebula GUI) and the Cloud Services (EC2 and OCCI)
- Authorization framework with fine-grained ACLs that allows multiple-role support for different types of users and administrators, delegated control to authorized users, secure isolated multi-tenant environments, and easy resource (VM template, VM image, VM instance, virtual network and host) sharing
Advanced Multi-tenancy with Group Management
- Administrators can groups users into organizations that can represent different projects, division…
- Each group have configurable access to shared resources so enabling a multi-tenant environment with multiple groups sharing the same infrastructure
- Configuration of special users that are restricted to public cloud APIs (e.g. EC2 or OCCI)
- Complete functionality for management of groups: create, delete, show…
On-demand Provision of Virtual Data Centers
- A Virtual Data Centers (VDC) is a fully-isolated virtual infrastructure environment where a group of users, under the control of the VDC administrator, can create and manage compute, storage and networking capacity
- Support for the creation and management of multiples VDCs within the same logical cluster and zone
- Advanced multi-tenancy with complete functionality for management of VDCs: create, delete, show…
Advanced Control and Monitoring of Virtual Infrastructure
- Image Repository Subsystem with catalog and complete functionality for VM image management: list, publish, unpublish, show, enable, disable, register, update, saveas, delete…
- Template Repository Subsystem with catalog and complete functionality for VM template management: add, delete, list…
- Full control of VM instance life-cycle and complete functionality for VM instance management: submit, deploy, migrate, livemigrate, stop, save, resume, cancel, shutdown, restart, delete, monitor, list…
- Broad network virtualization capabilities with traffic isolation, ranged or fixed networks, definition of generic attributes to define multi-tier services consisting of groups of inter-connected VMs, and complete functionality for virtual network management to interconnect VM instances: create, delete, monitor, list…
- Configurable system usage statistics to visualize and report resource usage data, to allow their integration with chargeback and billing platforms, or to guarantee fair share of resources among users
- Tagging of users, VM images and virtual networks with arbitrary metadata that can be later used by other components
Complete Virtual Machine Configuration
- Support for automatic configuration of VMs with advanced contextualization mechanisms
- Hook Manager to trigger administration scripts upon VM state change
- Wide range of guest operating system including Microsoft Windows and Linux
- Configuration of firewall for VMs to specify a set of black/white TCP/UDP ports
Advanced Control and Monitoring of Physical Infrastructure
- Host Management Subsystem with complete functionality for management of physical hosts: create, delete, enable, disable, monitor, list…
- Dynamic creation of clusters as a logical set of physical resources, namely: hosts, networks and data stores, within each zone
- Powerful and extensible built-in monitoring subsystem
Broad Commodity and Enterprise Platform Support
- Hypervisor agnostic Virtualization Subsystem with broad hypervisor support (Xen, KVM and VMware), centralized management of environments with multiple hypervisors, and support for multiple hypervisors within the same physical box
- Storage Subsystem with support for multiple data stores to balance I/O operations between storage servers, or to define different SLA policies (e.g. backup) and performance features for different VM types or users
- Storage Subsystem supporting any backend configuration with different datastore types: file system datastore, to store disk images in a file form and with image transferring using ssh or shared file systems (NFS, GlusterFS, Lustre…), iSCSI/LVM to store disk images in a block device form, and VMware datastore specialized for the VMware hypervisor that handle the vmdk format
- Optional integration with datacenter monitoring tools like Ganglia
Distributed Resource Optimization
- Powerful and flexible requirement/rank matchmaker scheduler providing automatic initial VM placement for the definition of workload and resource-aware allocation policies such as packing, striping, load-aware, affinity-aware…
- Resource quota management to allocate, track and limit resource utilization
Centralized Management of Multiple Zones
- Federation of multiple OpenNebula zones for scalability, isolation or multiple-site support
- Support for the creation and management of multiples clusters within the same zone
- Complete functionality for management of zones: create, delete, show, list…
High Availability
- Persistent database backend with support for high availability configurations
- Support for high availability architectures
Hybrid Cloud Computing and Cloudbursting
- Support for Amazon EC2 with most of the EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPC; and simultaneous access to multiple remote clouds
Standard Cloud Interfaces and Simple Self-Service Portal for Cloud Consumers
- OGF OCCI service, the emerging cloud API standard, and client tools
- AWS EC2 API service, the de facto cloud API standard, with compatibility with EC2 ecosystem tools and client tools
- Support for simultaneously exposing multiple cloud APIs
- Self-service provisioning portal to allow non-IT end users to easily create, deploy and manage compute, storage and network resources
Rich Command Line and Web Interfaces for Cloud Administrators
- Unix-like Command Line Interface to manage all resources: users, VM images, VM templates, VM instances, virtual networks, zones, VDCs, physical hosts, accounting, authentication, authorization…
- Easy-to-use Sunstone Graphical Interface providing usage graphics and statistics with cloudwatch-like functionality, VNC support, different system views for different roles, catalog access, multiple-zone management…
Multiple Deployment Options
- System features a small footprint, less than 10Mb
- Detailed log files for the different components that maintain a record of significant changes
Easy Extension and Integration
- Modular and extensible architecture to fit into any existing datacenter
- Customizable drivers for the main subsystems to easily leverage existing IT infrastructure and system management products: Virtualization, Storage, Monitoring, Image Repository, Network, Auth and Hybrid Cloud
- New drivers can be easily written in any language
- Plugin support to easily extend SunStone Graphical Interface with additional tabs to better integrate Cloud and VM management with each site own operations and tools
- Easily customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers
- Configuration and tuning parameters to adjust behavior of the cloud management instance to the requirements of the environment and use cases
- Well-documented database schema for accounting
- A Ruby API to build applications on top of the Zones/VDC component ZONA, the ZONes Api
- OpenNebula ecosystem with experimental components enhancing the functionality provided by OpenNebula
Reliability, Efficiency and Massive Scalability
- Proven on large scale infrastructures consisting of tens of thousands of cores and VMs
- Highly scalable database back-end with support for MySQL and SQLite
- Virtualization drivers adjusted for maximum scalability
- Very efficient core developed in C++ language