The OpenNebula team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the final version of OpenNebula 4.14, codename Great A’Tuin. One of the main focus of this release has been the Sunstone interface, which has been completely refactored for maintenance and performance reasons. Expect major improvements in Sunstone from now on. Also, we are sure you will like the subtle changes in the look and feel.

To support HPC oriented infrastructures based on OpenNebula, 4.14 enables the consumption of raw GPU devices existing on a physical host from a Virtual Machine. There is no overcommitment possible nor sharing of GPU devices among different Virtual Machines, so a new type of consumable has been defined in OpenNebula and taken into account by the scheduler. VMs can now request a GPU, and if OpenNebula finds one free resource of type GPU available, it will set up the VM with PCI passthrough access to the GPU resource, enabling applications to get the performance boost of the direct access to a GPU card.

OpenNebula users managing vCenter infrastructures will also benefit from this upgrade. The workflow of the VM importing feature has been greatly improved through Sunstone, making it easier to import your existing workload into OpenNebula. Moreover, 4.14 adds the possibility to instruct OpenNebula whether or not it should save the disks, protect your users against accidental data lost! Last, but not least, a contextualisation improvement now allows to directly pass scripts to be executed in boot time to vCenter VMs, increasing the flexibility in VM customisation from OpenNebula in vCenter.

Also new in 4.14 is the ability to create and maintain a tree of VM disks snapshots. Now VM disks can be reverted to a previous state at any given time, and they are preserved in the image if it is persistent in the image datastore. For instance, you can attach a disk to a VM, create a snapshot, detach it and attach it to a new VM, and revert to a previous state. Very handy, for instance, to keep a working history of datablocks that can contain dockerized applications.

Other very interesting new features made their into 4.14. A non-exhaustive list follows (check the full list of changes in the development portal):

• image resizing on boot time
• ability to save VMs into VM Templates for later use
• better state management of VMs
• flexible context definition of network attributes
• ability to import running VMs not launched by OpenNebula from all the supported hypervisors (including the hybrid ones, for instance now it is possible to manage through OpenNebula Azure, SoftLayer and EC2 VMs launched through their respective management portals)
• the possibility to cold attach disks and network interfaces to powered off machines (which complement the hot attach functionality)
• improvements in accounting to keep track of disk usage
• better logging in several areas
• the ability to pass scripts to VMs for guest OS customization

This is a stable release and so a recommended update. It incorporates important improvement since 4.12 and several bug fixes since 4.14 Beta2. Be sure to check the compatibility and upgrade guides. We invite you to download it and to check the QuickStart guides, as well as to browse the documentation, which has also been properly updated. If you want to take OpenNebula 4.14 for a quick test drive, take a look at the different SandBoxes.

Several organizations have sponsored the project through the Fund a Feature Program:

• Disk snapshots with Ceph backend was funded by Unity.
• Qcow2 snapshots implementation was funded by BIT.nl.
• GPU devices support was funded by SURFsara.
• Flexible network attributes definition in contextualization was funded by Université Catholique de Louvain.

The OpenNebula project would like to thank these organizations and the community members and users who have contributed to this software release by being active with the discussions, answering user questions, or providing patches for bugfixes, features and documentation.

Relevant Links

• Release Notes
• Downloads
• Documentation