Tino Vazquez

vOneCloud 3.0 Released – Full Storage and Network Support

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OpenNebula Systems has just announced the availability of vOneCloud version 3.0. This is the first vOneCloud release that offers full storage and network management capabilities.

vOneCloud 3.0 is powered by OpenNebula 5.4.0 ‘Medusa’, and, as such, it includes functionality present in Medusa relevant to vOneCloud:

  • Enhanced storage management, vOneCloud is fully aware of all VMs disks. Non-persistent images and volatiles disks are now supported.
  • Storage quotas and datastore capacity check, never run out of capacity correctly dimensioning the available datastores and the storage quotas given to end users
  • Balance storage load of VMs across datastores automatically without the need of Storage DRS
  • Linked clone support, add support for linked clones for VMs at the time of importing a VM Template
  • Disk resize capabilities, resize the capacity of a VM disk at boot time or when the VM is in poweroff
  • Save disk functionality, register any VM disk as an image for later use in VMs, either directly from a VM Template or through the disk attach operation
  • Save as Template functionality, save any VM as a VM Template at any point during its lifecycle
  • Folder management, define in which vCenter folder you want your VMs into, on a VM to VM basis.
  • Network creation support, a new vCenter network model is available in virtual network definition, standard and different port groups and vSwitches can be created from within OpenNebula. VLAN IDs, MTUs and number of ports can be specified when a port group is created.
  • Full storage and networking support in imported VM Templates, images and networks representing disks and network interfaces are created for VM templates and folder placement features.
  • Improved CDROM management, now a new CDROM drive is added to the VM if not present when an ISO image is attached
  • Imported VMs improvements, with the possibility of adding VNC to any imported VM.
  • Removed naming limitations, vCenter cluster and datastore names with spaces are now supported
  • Improved performance, up to two orders of magnitude of speedup in monitoring and import times, as well as less error prone synchronous calls to vCenter
  • Faster VM deployment, with up to 10 VM spinning up simultaneously per cluster
  • User input sorting, to ask information in the correct order to end users (for instance, username before password), and also new types (lists, booleans, etc)
  • Improved naming conventions, to allow importing resources with the same name in different vCenter locations
  • Numerous web interface enchancements, like automatic estimation of VM cost through the Showback mechanism, better VM information display in Cloud View, image upload resume option, improved user and group management dialogs and many more.
  • Better audit trail, now the history records of VMs includes the UID of the user that perfomed the action

Multiple bugfixes and documentation improvements have been included in this version. For instance, deleting SSH keys from cloud view, importing images with correct size, VM contextualization persistance across reboots, disk not removed if detached in poweroff state, context disk not displayed in Sunstone, skip import of resources if no permissions available, and a long list of other bugfixes and enhancements that can be consulted in the development portal.

OpenNebula Systems will run a booth at VMworld 2017 US in Las Vegas on August 27-31 and at VMworld 2017 EU in Barcelona on September 11-14 where they will demo the new version.

Upgrade to 3.0 from previous versions cannot be performed automatically. If you hold an active support subscription, please contact OpenNebula Systems to schedule a vOneCloud upgrade.

Relevant Links

Javier Fontan

TechDay Vancouver, 1 September 2017, hosted by Best Buy

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This year our friends at BestBuy Canada have organized a TechDay in Vancouver. As usual there will be a 4-hour OpenNebula tutorial and in the evening we will learn about the new release and whatever question you may have. Hurry up and join us!

vancouver

Agenda and Venue
Event Registration
Tino Vazquez

OpenNebula Newsletter – July 2017

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Check out the highlights of the OpenNebula project this last month regarding technology, community and outreach in this monthly newsletter of your favourite cloud management platform.

The agenda for the OpenNebulaConf EU 2017, in Madrid this October have been announced, including BlackBerry, Trivago, Runtastic and the Ministry of the Flemish community. Also, you can check the videos, pictures and slides of the OpenNebulaConf US 2017 in this post.

Technology

OpenNebula Medusa 5.4 is out in the wild, and the team is now analyzing carefully the feedback given by users to identify any issue with the release. So far things are looking good, the team will probably be releasing a 5.4.1 maintenance release in September to address the minor issues seen in the forum.

In Medusa, almost every component of OpenNebula has been reviewed to target usability and functional improvements, trying to keep API changes to a minimum to avoid disrupting ecosystem components. Three major features that are important to highlight follow.

An important focus has been on the vCenter integration, with an enhanced network and storage management. Also, new components have been added to improve the OpenNebula experience.

  • Full storage management. Non-Persistent images are now supported as well as volatile disks. OpenNebula is now aware of all VM disks and storage quotas can be enforced. Support for linked clones and Marketplace.
  • Full network management. It is now possible to create vCenter standard and distributed port groups and even vSwitches directly from within OpenNebula. You can assign a VLAN ID to a port group created by OpenNebula.
  • Improved monitoring. Up to two orders of magnitude of speedup.
  • An enhanced import process where naming limitations in imported resources has been removed and the ability to enable VNC automatically for Wild VMs.
  • Disk resizing, VM and Templates folder selection when a VM is deployed… and many more changes!

vcenter_vmdk_upload_sunstone_1
A new resource, the VM Groups, has been added to implement VM-VM and VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity rules. A VM group is a set of related virtual machines that may impose placement constraints based on affinity and anti-affinity rules. A VM group is defined as a set of Roles. A Role defines a VM type or class, and expressions to the VM Group can be added to define affinity between VM roles, or between VM and hosts. This ensures a dynamic approach to affinity/anti-affinity since new VMs can be enrolled to a particular Role at boot time, after the VM Group has been defined and other VMs added to it.

OpenNebula 5.4 brings to the table a native implementation of a consensus algorithm, which enables the High Availability deployment of the OpenNebula front-end without relying to third party components. This distributed consensus protocol provides fault-tolerance and state consistency across OpenNebula services.

And many other new features that can be checked out in the Medusa release notes.

The team is working now on a new release of vOneCloud, 3.0, which is going to bring all the excellence in vCenter management exposed by OpenNebula 5.4.

Community

Even in summer, the OpenNebula community does not go into vacation mode. It seems that it never sleeps

Spreading the word is a great support for the project, and it is very good news to learn how OpenNebula enables learning computer science and makes teachers jobs easier.

Software integrations with third party applications, like for instance this VDI (Disclaimer, tweet in spanish) really enriches the OpenNebula ecosystem.

Equally important are the maintenance of OpenNebula addons. Contributing an addon is great by all means, but maintaining it and extending the documentation, ie, keeping it alive, is what really makes it useful for future OpenNebula releases. This is why notices such as this new version of the LXDoNe or new documentation for the vCloud driver are very good news!

Outreach

The first ever OpenNebulaConf in the US was held this past June, in Boston to be precise. We had a lot of wonderful attendees and some really great speakers delivering really interesting talks and sharing their experiences. We would like to thank all attendees and speakers for their support. If you missed the conference, now you have a chance to watch the talks in the YouTube playlist, download the slides or take a look to the pictures of the conference.

The agenda for the next edition of the OpenNebulaConf EU that will take place in Madrid, Spain, this October. The conference will be packed with very interesting talks about the production use of OpenNebula, so make sure you register if you’ll be on the area!

conf_mad
The next OpenNebula TechDay will happen in Vancouver after the summer break, the 1st of September, hosted by Best Buy. The event is almost full, so if you are in the area make sure you register a soon as possible, or risk missing the opportunity!

The OpenNebula team is going to feature a booth in both VMworlds this year. If you are going to attend, do not forget to come by the OpenNebula booth to see a live demo of the latest stable version of your favourite CMP:

  • VMworld 2017 US, August 27-31, Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center. Booth 1121.
  • VMworld 2017 Europe, September 11-14, Barcelona, Fira Gran Via. Booth E430.

Also, check out the list of official training from OpenNebula Systems for this year. If you are new to OpenNebula, or want to improve you knowledge with an in-depth OpenNebula admin course, those are the dates and locations you need to keep in mind.

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Events page. We have also created a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.

OpenNebula

vOneCloud/OpenNebula at VMworld 2017 US in Las Vegas

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vmworld2017usa-banner_orig

Next 27-31 August VMworld 2017 US will be held in Las Vegas. This is a must attend event where almost everyone with an interest in virtualization and cloud computing will be networking with industry experts.

The OpenNebula team will be present in the VMworld with a booth dedicated to showcase the new upcoming vOneCloud 3.0 (release date in a few days incorporating the new OpenNebula 5.4), the open source replacement for VMware vCloud. There will be a focus on new features like enhanced network and storage management, support for linked clones, disk resizing, save-as template functionality for VMware VMs, disk save-as functionality, automatic storage scheduling, storage quotas and many more.

If you are planning to attend VMworld next month, make sure you register and do not forget to come around our booth, 1121. You will be able to see in a live demo how a VMware based infrastructure can be turned into a cloud with a slick, fully functional self-service portal to deliver a VM catalog to your end users, in 5 minutes!.

Tino Vazquez

OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’ is Out!

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The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the availability of the stable release of OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’. Medusa is the third release of the OpenNebula 5 series. A significant effort has been applied in this release to enhance features introduced in 5.2 Excession, while keeping an eye in implementing those features more demanded by the community.

As usual almost every component of OpenNebula has been reviewed to target usability and functional improvements, trying to keep API changes to a minimum to avoid disrupting ecosystem components. An important focus has been on the vCenter integration, with an enhanced network and storage management. Also, new components have been added to improve the OpenNebula experience.

A major overhaul has been applied to the vCenter integration. The team decided to go all the way and level the vCenter integration with the KVM support. This means:

  • Full storage management. Non-Persistent images are now supported as well as volatile disks. OpenNebula is now aware of all VM disks and storage quotas can be enforced. Support for linked clones and Marketplace.
  • Full network management. It is now possible to create vCenter standard and distributed port groups and even vSwitches directly from within OpenNebula. You can assign a VLAN ID to a port group created by OpenNebula.
  • Improved monitoring. Up to two orders of magnitude of speedup.
  • An enhanced import process where naming limitations in imported resources has been removed and the ability to enable VNC automatically for Wild VMs.
  • Disk resizing, VM and Templates folder selection when a VM is deployed… and many more changes!

disk_resizing

A new resource, the VM Groups, has been added to implement VM-VM and VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity rules. A VM group is a set of related virtual machines that may impose placement constraints based on affinity and anti-affinity rules. A VM group is defined as a set of Roles. A Role defines a VM type or class, and expressions to the VM Group can be added to define affinity between VM roles, or between VM and hosts. This ensures a dynamic approach to affinity/anti-affinity since new VMs can be enrolled to a particular Role at boot time, after the VM Group has been defined and other VMs added to it.

 

 

vmg_wizard_create

To top it all, OpenNebula 5.4 brings to the table a native implementation of a consensus algorithm, which enables the High Availability deployment of the OpenNebula front-end without relying to third party components. This distributed consensus protocol provides fault-tolerance and state consistency across OpenNebula services. A consensus algorithm is built around two concepts, System State -the data stored in the database tables- and Log -a sequence of SQL statements that are consistently applied to the OpenNebula DB in all servers-. To preserve a consistent view of the system across servers, modifications to system state are performed through a special node, the leader. The servers in the OpenNebula cluster elects a single node to be the leader. The leader periodically sends heartbeats to the other servers (follower*) to keep its leadership. If a leader fails to send the heartbeat, followers promote to candidates and start a new election. This feature, with support from floating IPs and a proper Sunstone configuration, gives robustness to OpenNebula clouds. This new functionality of distributed system state is also used to implement OpenNebula federation. In both cases (Federation and HA) no support is needed from MySQL to create a clustered DB, so admins can forget about MySQL replication.

There are many other improvements in 5.4, like improved VM lifecycle, flexible resource permissions, life disk resizing, improved Ceph support, enhanced disk I/O feedback, showback cost estimate in Sunstone, flexible IPv6 definition, http proxy support for marketplace, purge tools for the OpenNebula database, resource group isolation, multiple Sunstone improvements (VNC, password dialogs, confirmation dialogs, better vCenter support, persistent labels, usability enhacenents), networking improvements, user inputs in OneFlow and many many more features to enrich your cloud experience. As with previous releases, and in order to achieve a reliable cloud management platform, the team has gone great lengths to fix reported bugs and improve general usability.

This OpenNebula release is named after the Medula Nebula, a large planetary nebula in the constellation of Gemini on the Canis Minor border. It also known as Abell 21 and Sharpless 2-274. It was originally discovered in 1955 by UCLA astronomer George O. Abell, who classified it as an old planetary nebula. The braided serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggests the serpent hair of Medusa found in ancient Greek mythology.

OpenNebula 5.4 Medusa is considered to be a stable release and as such, and update is available in production environments.

The OpenNebula project would like to thank 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.

The VM Groups functionality, the configurable semantics of the VM operations permissions (ADMIN, MANAGE and USE) and the improved VM history functionality were funded by BlackBerry in the context of the Fund a Feature Program. The configurable image persistency setting and the new Non-SLAAC IPv6 Address Range were funded by University of Louvain.

Relevant Links

OpenNebula

OpenNebulaConf 2017 EU: Agenda Available

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screen-shot-2017-07-04-at-7-52-32-pm

The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the agenda and line-up of speakers for the sixth OpenNebula Conference to be held in Madrid from the 23 to the 24 of October 2017.

OpenNebulaConf is your chance to get an up-close look at OpenNebula’s latest product updates, hear the project’s vision and strategy, get hands-on tutorials and workshops, and get lots of opportunities to network and share ideas with your peers. You’ll also get to attend all the parties and after-parties to keep the networking and the good times going long after the show floor closes for the day.

Sign Up Now

Keynotes

The agenda includes four keynote speakers:

Educational Sessions 

This year we will have two pre-conference tutorials:

Community Sessions

We had a big response to the call for presentations. Thanks for submitting a talk proposal!.

Like in previous editions, we will have a single track with 10-minute talks, to keep all the audience focused and interested. We have given our very best to get the perfect balance of topics. We will have talks by StorPool, LINBIT, NetWays, LRZ…

We will also have a Meet the Experts sessions providing an informal atmosphere where delegates can interact with experts who will give their undivided attention for knowledge, insight and networking; and a session for 5-minute lightning talks. If you would like to talk in these sessions, please contact us!

Besides its amazing talks, there are multiple goodies packed with the OpenNebulaConf registration. You have until September 20th to get your OpenNebulaConf tickets for the deeply discounted price of just €300 (plus taxes) apiece. However, please consider, space is limited, register asap.

Sign Up Now

We are looking forward to welcoming you personally in Madrid!

 

Jaime Melis

OpenNebulaConf 2017 US Wrap-up

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A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated OpenNebulaConf 2017 US. This was the first ever OpenNebulaConf in the US. We had a lot of wonderful attendees and some really great speakers that delivered really interesting talks and that shared their experiences.

We would like to send a heartfelt thank you to the community members, speakers and friends that made this possible.

If you missed the conference, now you have a chance to watch the talks in the YouTube playlist, download the slides or take a look to the pictures of the conference. Enjoy.

Tino Vazquez

OpenNebula Newsletter – June 2017

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Check out the highlights of the OpenNebula project this last June regarding technology, community and outreach in this monthly newsletter of your favourite cloud management platform.

This last month the OpenNebulaConf 2017 US took place in Boston, MA. Thanks to all the keynotes (Harvard, Telefonica and Akamai) and speakers, as well as to all the attendees that came to the Charles Hotel to share their OpenNebula experiences with us! Videos, slides and pics of the conference covering all the keynotes and talks will be published soon, stay tuned! The keynote speakers for the OpenNebulaConf EU 2017, in Madrid this October, have been announced, including BlackBerry, Trivago, Runtastic and the Ministry of the Flemish community.

Technology

OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’ Beta 1 and Beta 2 have been released this past June, and now the team is working at full throttle on stabilizing. Your feedback is of the utmost importance in this regard, so if you have the time please download and test the latest Beta, and let us know about your feedback in the community forum or the development portal.

Medusa is the third release of the OpenNebula 5 series. Almost every component of OpenNebula has been reviewed to target usability and functional improvements, trying to keep API changes to a minimum to avoid disrupting ecosystem components. An important focus has been on the vCenter integration, with an enhanced network and storage management, support for linked clones, disk resizing, save as template functionality (this is a new addition working on Beta2) for vCenter VMs, disk save as functionality, automatic storage scheduling, storage quotas and many more! 5.4 Medusa takes a giant leap forward in vCenter support, bringing it up to speed with KVM VM management.

But there is more! A new resource to implement affinity/anti affinity VM-to-VM and Host-to-Host has been added to OpenNebula, the VM Groups. A VM group is a set of related virtual machines that may impose placement constraints based on affinity and anti-affinity rules.

vmg_wizard_create
To top it all, OpenNebula 5.4 brings to the table a native implementation of a consensus algorithm, which enables the High Availability deployment of the OpenNebula front-end without relying to third party components. This new functionality of distributed system state is also used to implement OpenNebula federation. There are many other improvements in 5.4 like improved VM lifecycle, flexible resource permissions, live disk resizing, improved Ceph support, enhanced disk I/O feedback, showback cost estimate in Sunstone, flexible IPv6 definition, http proxy support for marketplace and many more!!

This OpenNebula release is named after the Medula Nebula, a large planetary nebula in the constellation of Gemini on the Canis Minor border. The OpenNebula team is now set to bug-fixing mode. Note that this is a beta release aimed at testers and developers to try the new features, and send a more than welcomed feedback for the final release.

This coming month of July is going to be very exciting as we believe it will set a new top mark on cloud management platform with the release of the stable 5.4 version of OpenNebula!

Community

So it seems that the OpenNebula community hasn’t yet gone into vacation mode. This month it features outstanding contributions which enrich greatly the OpenNebula ecosystem.
The first highlight we want to make is this nifty android vulnerability scanner using OpenNebula and android emulators. The scanner leverages OpenNebula VM management capabilities to provision VM emulators and then uses ADB to connect and start the analysis. Very good work!

Next, a new version of the integration component for OpenNebula and cloudkeeper has been released. Cloudkeeper read image lists provided by EGI AppDB, parse their content and decide what cloud appliances should be added, updated or removed from managed cloud. During the addition and update cloudkeeper is able to download an appliance’s image and convert it to the format supported by the managed cloud.

Learning how OpenNebula is being used in real case scenarios is very motivating. This is why the team is very excited with the OnLife Project by Telefonica, which aims to build a CORD implementation using OpenNebula to virtualize and advance the Central Offices which gives you guys internet connection. Cool, isn’t it?

Also cool to learn how people spread the world, like this very interesting talk on OpenNebula and Ceph given in the Harvard IT Summit by the FAS Research Computing group.

If you are an OpenNebula newbie and english does not flow strongly on you, but you know french, check out this tutorial on how to install OpenNebula over a Debian OS.

It is always pleasant to receive praise such as this one, specially after releasing a Beta version, and also specially being a Beta as feature packed as Medusa 5.4 Beta. We are counting on you to unearth as many nasty bugs as possible before the final release! Please let us know through the community forum or the development portal about such findings. The call for translations of the Sunstone web interface to different languages is still open, check out the instructions on how to contribute to the translations. THANKS!

Outreach

This last month the first US edition of the OpenNebulaConf happened in Boston and it was a total success! Outstanding keynotes by Harvard, Akamai and Telefonica showed why OpenNebula is a good choice if you are thinking about running a production cloud environment and simplicity, robustness and innovative features are the key points you are interested about. The conference also featured talks from integrators and cloud admins working in real world use cases running OpenNebula clouds. Also, several educational talks from members of the OpenNebula team were given on host topics like Docker, vCenter integration, hybrid cloud and so on. We want to thank everyone that attended the conference and contributed to create such a productive atmosphere, as well as enjoyed the beer and nice food at the Grafton! We will be uploading the videos, slides and pictures very soon, stay tuned.35565734105_f4c071e4e8_z

This year’s OpenNebulaConf EU will take place in Madrid, Spain, this October. The keynote lineup has already been announced, and we will be publishing the agenda in a few days. The conference will be packed with very interesting talks about the production use of OpenNebula, so make sure you register if you’ll be on the area!

The next OpenNebula TechDay will happen in Vancouver after the summer break, the 1st of September, hosted by Best Buy. The event is almost full, so if you are in the area make sure you register a soon as possible, or risk missing the opportunity!

The OpenNebula team is going to feature a booth in both VMworlds this year. If you are going to attend, do not forget to come by the OpenNebula booth to see a live demo of the latest stable version of your favourite CMP:

  • VMworld 2017 US, August 27-31, Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center
  • VMworld 2017 Europe, September 11-14, Barcelona, Fira Gran Via

Also, check out the list of official training from OpenNebula Systems for this year. If you are new to OpenNebula, or want to improve you knowledge with an in-depth OpenNebula admin course, those are the dates and locations you need to keep in mind.

Remember that you can see slides and resources from past events in our Events page. We have also created a Slideshare account where you can see the slides from some of our recent presentations.

OpenNebula

Telefonica using OpenNebula in the OnLife Innovation Project about Edge Computing

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Centralized clouds are not appropriate for applications that require moving large amounts of distributed data or with interactive users that require low latency and real time processing, like Internet of Things (IoT), video streaming, gaming and many mobile applications. These applications require pushing data and processing away from centralized data centers to the extreme of the network closer to users where possible, this is called edge or fog computing.

Telecommunications companies are in a unique position to solve this problem because central offices (COs) are usually located close to their customers’ premises and thus close to IoT devices. In addition, COs can be transformed into clouds. Similar to the cloudlet concept, in which small-scale cloud datacenters at the edge of the Internet are used to support resource-intensive and interactive mobile applications, this can extend IoT service providers’ computing facilities to the network edge.

There are several initiatives to achieve this goal, mainly built around mobile-edge computing (MEC)—a network architecture concept that enables cloud-computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the cellular network. Among these, the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) initiative seems to be better suited for convergent telecoms, as it integrates network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN).

Telefónica is utilizing open-source OpenNebula and ON.Lab’s ONOS to prototype a new generation of CORD-based Central Offices that are fully IPv6 compliant and allow for the deployment of programmable services rather than the traditional black box solutions provided by proprietary solutions. Telefónica’s OnLife project aims to virtualize the access network and give third-party Internet of Things application developers and content providers cloud-computing capabilities at the network edge.

cord-paper-ieee-computer-rev20161207

If you want further details about how Telefonica is using OpenNebula to build its Edge Computing platform you can download the paper “Extending the Cloud to the Network Edge” or attend the Telefonica keynote “Fast Prototyping of a C.O. into a purpose built Data Center for Multi-access Edge Computing” in the upcoming 5th edition of the OpenNebula Conference in Cambridge, MA, 19-20 June.

Tino Vazquez

OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’ Beta is Out!

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The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the availability of the first beta release of OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’. This version is the third release of the OpenNebula 5 series. A significant effort has been applied in this release to stabilize features introduced in 5.2 Excession, while keeping an eye in implementing those features more demanded by the community.

As usual almost every component of OpenNebula has been reviewed to target usability and functional improvements, trying to keep API changes to a minimum to avoid disrupting ecosystem components. An important focus has been on the vCenter integration, with an enhanced network and storage management. Also, new components have been added to improve the OpenNebula experience.

A major overhaul has been applied to the vCenter integration. The team decided to go all the way and level the vCenter integration with the KVM support. This means:

  • Full storage management. Non-Persistent images are now supported as well as volatile disks. OpenNebula is now aware of all VM disks and storage quotas can be enforced. Support for linked clones and Marketplace.
  • Full network management. It is now possible to create vCenter standard and distributed port groups and even vSwitches directly from within OpenNebula. You can assign a VLAN ID to a port group created by OpenNebula.
  • Improved monitoring. Up to two orders of magnitude of speedup.
  • An enhanced import process where naming limitations in imported resources has been removed and the ability to enable VNC automatically for Wild VMs.
  • Disk resizing, VM and Templates folder selection when a VM is deployed… and many more changes!

vcenter_network_create

A new resource to implement affinity/anti affinity VM-to-VM and Host-to-Host has been added to OpenNebula, the VM Groups. A VM group is a set of related virtual machines that may impose placement constraints based on affinity and anti-affinity rules. A VM group is defined as a set of Roles. A Role defines a VM type or class, and expressions to the VM Group can be added to define affinity between VM roles, or between VM and hosts. This ensures a dynamic approach to affinity/anti affinity since new VMs can be enrolled to a particular Role at boot time, after the VM Group has been defined and other VMs added to it.

vmgroups_ilustration

To top it all, OpenNebula 5.4 brings to the table a native implementation of a consensus algorithm, which enables the High Availability deployment of the OpenNebula front-end without relying to third party components. This distributed consensus protocol provides fault-tolerance and state consistency across OpenNebula services. A consensus algorithm is built around two concepts, System State -the data stored in the database tables- and Log -a sequence of SQL statements that are consistently applied to the OpenNebula DB in all servers-. To preserve a consistent view of the system across servers, modifications to system state are performed through a special node, the leader. The servers in the OpenNebula cluster elects a single node to be the leader. The leader periodically sends heartbeats to the other servers (follower*) to keep its leadership. If a leader fails to send the heartbeat, followers promote to candidates and start a new election. This feature, with support from floating IPs and a proper Sunstone configuration, gives robustness to OpenNebula clouds. This new functionality of distributed system state is also used to implement OpenNebula federation. In both cases (Federation and HA) no support is needed from MySQL to create a clustered DB, so admins can forget about MySQL replication.

There are many other improvements in 5.4, like improved VM lifecycle, flexible resource permissions, life disk resizing, improved Ceph support, enhanced disk I/O feedback, showback cost estimate in Sunstone, flexible IPv6 definition, http proxy support for marketplace, purge tools for the OpenNebula database, resource group isolation, multiple Sunstone improvements (VNC, password dialogs, confirmation dialogs, better vCenter support, persistent labels, usability enhacenents), networking improvements, user inputs in OneFlow and many many more features to enrich your cloud experience. As with previous releases, and in order to achieve a reliable cloud management platform, the team has gone great lengths to fix reported bugs and improve general usability.

This OpenNebula release is named after the Medula Nebula, a large planetary nebula in the constellation of Gemini on the Canis Minor border. It also known as Abell 21 and Sharpless 2-274. It was originally discovered in 1955 by UCLA astronomer George O. Abell, who classified it as an old planetary nebula. The braided serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggests the serpent hair of Medusa found in ancient Greek mythology.

The OpenNebula team is now set to bug-fixing mode. Note that this is a beta release aimed at testers and developers to try the new features, and send a more than welcomed feedback for the final release. Note that being a beta there is no migration path from the previous stable version (5.2.1) nor migration path to the final stable version (5.4.0).

The OpenNebula project would like to thank 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.

The VM Groups functionality, the configurable semantics of the VM operations permissions (ADMIN, MANAGE and USE) and the improved VM history functionality were funded by BlackBerry in the context of the Fund a Feature Program. The configurable image persistency setting and the new Non-SLAAC IPv6 Address Range were funded by University of Louvain.

Relevant Links