This section describes the detailed features and functionality of the latest version of OpenNebula (v4.4) for the management of private clouds and datacenter virtualization(*). It includes links to the different parts of the documentation and the web site that provide extended information about each feature. We also provide a summarized table of key features.
inlinetoc
Powerful User Security Management
-
-
-
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…
-
-
Complete functionality for management of
groups: create, delete, show…
-
On-demand Provision of Virtual Data Centers
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, clone…
-
Full control of VM instance life-cycle and complete functionality for
VM instance management: submit, deploy, migrate, livemigrate, reschedule, stop, save, resume, cancel, shutdown, restart, reboot, delete, monitor, list, power-on, power-off,…
-
-
Volume hotplugging to easily hot plug a volatile disk created on-the-fly or an existing image from a Datastore to a running VM
-
IPv6 support with definition site and global unicast addresses
Configurable
system accounting 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
-
Plain files datastore to store kernels, ramdisks and files to be used in context. The whole set of OpenNebula features applies, e.g. ACLs, ownership…
Complete Virtual Machine Configuration
Advanced Control and Monitoring of Physical Infrastructure
-
-
Dynamic creation of
clusters as a logical set of physical resources, namely: hosts, networks and data stores, within each zone
-
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…),
LVM to store disk images in a block device form,
Ceph for distributed block device, and
VMware datastore specialized for the VMware hypervisor that handle the vmdk format and with support for VMFS
-
Virtual Router fully integrated with OpenNebula to provide basic L3 services like NATting, DHCP,
DNS…
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…
Advanced requirement expressions with cluster attributes for VM placement, affinity policies, any host attribute for scheduling expressions, and scheduler feedback through VM tags
Powerful and flexible
requirement/rank matchmaker scheduler for storage load balancing to distribute efficiently the I/O of the VMs across different disks, LUNs or several storage backends
-
Support for
cgroups on KVM to enforce VM CPU usage as described in the VM Template
Centralized Management of Multiple Zones
High Availability
Marketplace with an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula cloud environments
-
Management of Multi-tier Applications
-
-
Provide configurable services from a catalog and self-service portal
Enable tight, efficient administrative control
-
-
-
Gain Insight into Cloud Applications
-
With a security token the VMs can call back home and report guest and/or application status in a simple way, that can be easily queried through OpenNebula interfaces (Sunstone, CLI or
API).
Users and administrators can use it to gather metrics, detect problems in their applications, and trigger
OneFlow auto-scaling rules
Hybrid Cloud Computing and Cloud Bursting
-
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
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
Easy Extension and Integration
Modular and extensible architecture to fit into any existing datacenter
-
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
-
-
-
-
-
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
(*) Because OpenNebula leverages the functionality exposed by the underlying platform services, its functionality and performance may be affected by the limitations imposed by those services.
The list of features may change on the different platform configurations
Not all platform configurations exhibit a similar performance and stability
The features may change to offer users more features and integration with other virtualization and cloud components
The features may change due to changes in the functionality provided by underlying virtualization services