OpenNebula 2.0 RC 1 (1.9.90)

23th September, 2010. The OpenNebula team has released the first release candidate version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0. OpenNebula 2.0 RC 1 is targeted at testers and users that would like to peep at what's coming to their clouds!. OpenNebula 2.0 RC includes a significant amount of changes and new features in many areas, bringing the most flexible, scalable and feature rich Cloud Toolkit to the Free Software community. OpenNebula 2.0 is the result of a close collaboration with our user community to address their scalability, flexibility and security requirements in large-scale production systems.

With respect to the previous Beta Release (1.9.80), the OpenNebula 2.0 RC1 features a new set of decoupled actions from the drivers. This means that wit OpenNebula 2.0 it is even easier to tune the operations performed upon specific actions (e.g. shutdown, create, cancel). Also this reduces the number of connections to the wokernodes so you should also experiment performance improvements in some areas.

This new release will break compatibility with OpenNebula 1.4 (at DB and API levels), therefore we've decided to follow a larger release cycle to make a smooth transition period, and also to stabilize API's and internal data models for the new components.

What is new in OpenNebula 2.0 Beta1

  • Image Repository. The Image Repository allows users to easily specify disk images from a catalog without worrying about low-level disk configuration attributes or block device mapping. Also, image access control is applied to the images registered in the repository, hence simplifying multi-user environments and image sharing. The traditional method of specifying VM disks is also fully supported. More info...
  • MySQL support. OpenNebula can work now with MySQL or Sqlite DBs backends. The new MySQL support brings important performance and scalability improvements compared to the Sqlite implementation. MySQL is the recommended option for large-scale clouds. More info...
  • Scalability Improvements. Several components of OpenNebula have been tuned to work with tens of thousands of VMs, including the redesign of the scheduler and adjustments to the monitoring modules.
  • Separate VM and Information actions. The specific operations performed when monitoring a host or performing an specific operation on a VM has been decoupled from the driver code base. Now it is even easier to tune your cloud. Also the number of connections to the node have been reduced.
  • Cluster support. Physical hosts can now be grouped in logical clusters, so after a cluster is defined it can be then used to set the placement of a VM. More info...
  • Authorization & Authentication Drivers. The authorization and authentication processes in OpenNebula have been totally redesigned. Now they can be handled natively by the OpenNebula core, offering the same functionality as OpenNebula 1.4. Alternatively, the A&A processes can be handled by an external component that can be integrated with any A&A system or user maps (e.g. LDAP, Kerberos…). As an example OpenNebula 2.0 features a quota based authorization module and user authentication based on RSA keys. More info...
  • Virtual Networking Improvements. OpenNebula 2.0 lets you define generic attributes associated to a a Virtual Network (e.g. gateway, dns servers…) that can then be included in the context of a VM. This will let you easily configure VMs with multiple NICs. Additionally Virtual Networks can now be defined as public, and thus shared among multiple users.
  • Improved EC2 support. The EC2 Query server can now be used with the EC2 ecosystem, supported third party applications include ElasticFox or EucaTools. More info...
  • Java Bindings for the OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) OpenNebula 2.0 includes JAVA bindings that wraps the XML-RPC interface methods exposed by the core. More info...

Here you can find the complete list of changes

Incompatible Changes in OpenNebula 2.0 RC1

Since OpenNebula 2.0 Beta a new DB schema has been introduced. The new schema is not compatible with the schema present in OpenNebula 1.4. Host, Networks or Virtual Machines defined in OpenNebula 1.4 installs will not longer work with this release.

OpenNebula 2.0 includes new API calls and methods. However there have been no changes in those API calls already supported in OpenNebula 1.4. Applications using OCA (Ruby and Java bindings) are expected to work with OpenNebula 2.0.

Getting OpenNebula 2.0 RC 1

The complete source tree for OpenNebula can be freely downloaded here. The compilation has been tested on the main linux distributions, please check the platform notes for more information.

Also binary packages for Ubuntu 10.04, CentOS 5.5, Debian 5.0.6 and RHEL 5.5 are available for download.

We will appreciate it if you let us know your feedback after trying the new version!, and report your bugs either at the development portal or at the mailing list.

About OpenNebula 2.0 RC 1

Please refer to the OpenNebula 2.0 documentation guides to install and configure your system. More information about OpenNebula can be found at:

Solved Bugs

For a detailed changelog of bugs addressed by OpenNebula 2.0 RC1 check the development portal.