Blog – OpenNebula

Telefonica using OpenNebula in the OnLife Innovation Project about Edge Computing

June 7, 2017/0 Comments/in Experiences, OpenNebulaConf, Project /by OpenNebula

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.

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.

OpenNebula 5.4 ‘Medusa’ Beta is Out!

June 6, 2017/0 Comments/in Outreach, Project /by Tino Vazquez

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!

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.

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

OpenNebula Newsletter – May 2017

June 2, 2017/0 Comments/in Newsletter, Outreach, Project /by Tino Vazquez

If you want to keep up to date with the latest news from the OpenNebula project this past month, check out this monthly edition of the most innovative open source cloud management platform.

The OpenNebulaConf US 2017 will take place this month! This 19th an 20th part of the OpenNebula team will be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can already check the agenda with keynotes by Akamai, Telefonica and Harvard. Also, the keynote speakers for the OpenNebulaConf EU 2017, in Madrid this October, have already been announced, including BlackBerry, Trivago, Runtastic and the Ministry of the Flemish community.

Technology

OpenNebula 5.4 Beta is just around the corner! Codenamed Medusa, OpenNebula 5.4 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.

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.

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
purge tools for the OpenNebula database
resource group isolation
user inputs in OneFlow

and many many more features to enrich your cloud experience! We’ll appreciate any feedback about the 5.4 Beta to iron out possible issues prior to the upcoming stable release.

Community

Maintaining an OpenNebula addon is not an easy task, but it is a crucial one for the success and widespread adoption of a third party component. Keeping up to date, and tested, against the latest OpenNebula version is of paramount importance to ensure its use by OpenNebula users. We want to bring you attention over the expertly crafted LXDoNe, and addon to enable OpenNebula on the management of LXD Containers. LXD is a daemon which provides a REST API to drive LXC containers. Containers are lightweight OS-level Virtualization instances, they behave like Virtual Machines but don’t suffer from hardware emulation processing penalties by sharing the kernel with the host.

Our friends at Comsysto have published a very interesting article on how to build a Private Cloud infrastructure with OpenNebula. This efforts are very important for the community since they spread the word and help to present what OpenNebula is about under other perspectives, enriching the ecosystem.

With OpenNebula we can build a simple and robust infrastructure that is focused on users needs and not on vendor specifics. Upon basic setup, user’s can already benefit from the installation because OpenNebula enables the user to be self-sustained and not to depend on System administrator or vendor to create and manage their VM’s. It is easily scalable and it can be installed on top of most hardware.

It is also very satisfying to learn how fellow developers chose OpenNebula to build their Continuous Integration infrastructures, like this fine article by the Qt folks.

Two thumbs up to all the OpenNebula advocates that support new OpenNebula users (or more seasoned users) in our support forum and in the IRC channel at freenode (#opennebula). You are a great asset to this project!

We do our best to review and incorporate those PRs aligned with the OpenNebula roadmap. We are grateful for the numerous contributions that help stabilize and enhance the OpenNebula software.

Outreach

The first US edition of the OpenNebulaConf is due in two weeks! Specifically, this June 19-20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are a few places left if you are willing to attend, but you should register fast! The european edition will be held in Madrid, Spain, on October 23-24.

We had three very successful OpenNebula TechDays this past month of May. The first one was based in Madrid and hosted by Telefonica, featuring interesting talks about the use of OpenNebula in large enterprises. The TechDay in Sofia hosted by StorPool was oriented to integrations and interesting use cases on top of OpenNebula. The Barcelona TechDay hosted by CSUC, with a great turnout, was focused to the usage of OpenNebula in academic fields to foster research. Thanks a lot to those who came to the TechDays and for the organizers for hosting them!

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.

Talks of the TechDay Barcelona, 23 May 2017, hosted by CSUC

May 31, 2017/0 Comments/in Outreach /by Jaime Melis

This was a really great event. Big thanks to all the attendees for being so engaged. There was a great discussion about vCenter, High Availability coming up in 5.4 and Containers!

More info of the event here: https://opennebula.org/community/techdays/techday-barcelona-2017/

OpenNebula, new features and a focus on vCenter by Jaime Melis, OpenNebula
Hybrid Clouds: Dancing with Virtual Machines by Jordi Guijarro, CSUC
Incoming Technologies for virtualized environments and ISPs by Eduardo Vales, Cesar Corral, FlyTech (no slides available)
OpenNebula Oneflow: give me the flow! by Jose A. Alcantara, XRQTC
Civil War: LXD vs Docker by Xavier Peralta, CSUC

We would like to thank also our host CSUC and the sponsor of the event FlyTech.

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Enjoy!

techday-bcn-2017

Talks of the TechDay Sofia, 11 May 2017, hosted by Storpool

May 23, 2017/0 Comments/in Outreach /by Javier Fontan

Thanks to the attendees, speakers and Storpool for the successful event! Here you have the links to the presentations.

	OpenNebula at virtion, by Michael Kutzner, Owner and CEO of virtion GmbH
	Disaster Recovery solution with OpenNebula and StorPool, by Boyan Krosnov,Chief of Product of StorPool
	OpenNebula 5.4 Enhancements vCenter Integration, by OpenNebula Systems

Our friends at Storpool recorded the afternoon sessions and are available as video:

Enjoy!

Talks of the TechDay Madrid, 9 May 2017, hosted by Telefónica

May 11, 2017/0 Comments/in Outreach /by Jaime Melis

Big thank you to all the attendees and all the speakers for such a great event! The talks were really top-notch, so in case you didn’t have the chance to join us for this event, we would like share the slides with you!

	OpenNebula a key component of OnLife Networks by Alfonso Aurelio Carrillo Aspiazu, Chief Architect OnLife Networks, Telefónica S.A.
	Automation strategy for the services provisioning (spanish), by Ruben Saavedra & Roman Martin, IECISA
	The Science in the clouds. IAAS CSIC: present and future (spanish), by Jacinto Vera & Angel L. Rodríguez, CSIC
	OpenNebula 5.4 Enhancements vCenter Integration, by OpenNebula Systems

Enjoy!
workshop

TechDay in Sofia, 11 May 2017, Hosted by StorPool

May 5, 2017/0 Comments/in Community, Outreach /by Javier Fontan

Next week we are organizing a TechDay in Sofia, Bulgaria organized by our friends from Storpool.

As usual we will have a tutorial in the morning and some talks in the afternoon:

15:00 – 15:30: OpenNebula at virtion

Michael Kutzner, Owner and CEO of virtion GmbH

Introduction to virtion
Opennebula@virtion
- private and hybrid clouds
  self service – Sunstone
  API integration
  VM Management
  Customer integrations
Storpool
- Opennebula integration
  Virtion use cases
Outlook
- Integrate neW storpool features
  Multi site

15:30 – 16:00: Disaster Recovery solution with OpenNebula and StorPool

Boyan Krosnov,Chief of Product of StorPool

In this talk we’ll explore a DR solution based on OpenNebula, developed by StorPool and deployed at a financial services organization. This solution represents a break-through for OpenNebula and StorPool technologies in a very conservative sector.
The solution uses two OpenNebula orchestrators using the federated identities scheme and two StorPool storage systems connected to each other with an encrypted site-to-site link.
It highlights how easy it is to extend OpenNebula to perform additional functionality, even without modifying the upstream OpenNebula software.

16:30 – 17:00: Demo OpenNebula and VMware vCenter

Javi Fontán, OpenNebula Developer

In this demo OpenNebula will be shown managing a vCenter infrastructure.

Make sure you register soon as the seats are almost gone! There will be a live stream of the event so stay tuned for more information.

See you in Sofia

TechDay Madrid, 9 May 2017, hosted by Telefónica

May 3, 2017/0 Comments/in Outreach /by Jaime Melis

The OpenNebula TechDays are full day events to learn about OpenNebula with a hands-on cloud installation and operation workshop, and presentations from community members and users. These events are targeted at cloud architects, data center admins, systems admins, systems integrators, DevOps architects, and solutions architect. The emphasis for local speakers and users to come together and talk about things that they care about most, and to share stories from their experiences using OpenNebula.

This TechDay will feature talks from:

	OpenNebula a key component of OnLife Networks by Alfonso Aurelio Carrillo Aspiazu, Chief Architect OnLife Networks, Telefónica S.A.
	Automation strategy for the services provisioning, by Ruben Saavedra & Roman Martin, IECISA
	The Science in the clouds. IAAS CSIC: present and future, by Jacinto Vera & Angel L. Rodríguez, CSIC

More info.
Register for this Event.

By the way, there’s a Star Wars Rogue One exhibition going on!

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OpenNebulaConf EU 2017: Keynote Speakers and Call for Presentations

May 2, 2017/0 Comments/in OpenNebulaConf, Project /by OpenNebula

We are excited to announce that Armin Deliomini from Runtastic, Perry Manuk from Trivago and Tom Van Gulck from Ministry of the Flemish Community will be keynote speakers at the Sixth OpenNebula Cloud Conference, the must-attend open cloud event, that will take place on October 23-24 in Madrid. More speakers will be announced shortly and a preliminary program will be ready by the end of June. This is the fifth edition of this open cloud conference in Europe. The call for presentations is open through May 20 and the very early bird registration is available through May 31.

There is an OpenNebula Training event in Madrid after the conference if you want to learn more about OpenNebula and cloud computing, or get the OpenNebula certification.

OpenNebula Conferences are vendor-neutral events focused on real-world practices and how to successfully implement open source in your cloud. They are education events that serve as a meeting point of cloud users, developers, administrators, integrators and researchers, featuring talks with real user experiences and use cases. They also include hands-on tutorials, lightning talks, and hacking sessions that provide an opportunity to discuss burning ideas, and meet face to face to discuss development. Previous speakers include Santander Bank, CentOS, European Space Agency, FermiLab, Puppet, Red Hat, BlackBerry, Telefonica,,Runtastic, Unity3D, Harvard University and Citrix.

We are looking forward to welcoming you personally in Madrid!

OpenNebula Newsletter – April 2017

April 28, 2017/0 Comments/in Newsletter, Outreach, Project /by Tino Vazquez

Latest news from the OpenNebula project, highlights from the community and the dissemination efforts carried out in the project this past month in this monthly edition of your favourite cloud management platform’s newsletter.

June is around the corner! The OpenNebulaConf US will take place on June 19-20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can already check the agenda with keynotes by Akamai, Telefonica and Harvard, and still benefit from the early bird registration until 12th of May.

The following OpenNebula TechDays are drawing a lot of attention. Madrid (hosted by Telefonica), Sofia (hosted by Storpool) and Barcelona (hosted by CSUC) registrations are almost full, check the agendas if you are interested in attending.

Technology

OpenNebula new major release is almost in feature freeze, and the numerous new additions are being stabilized. The vCenter driver is getting a major revamp in terms of storage and network management (check out more details in this article), non persistent disks and storage quotas, as well as network creation, mean an important boost in vCenter support. These new features will enhance OpenNebula provisioning model over vCenter based infrastructures, increasing the already wide range of use cases that can be implemented.

OpenNebula HA configuration in the front-end has been possible for quite a while. It currently relies on external components to ensure this HA, but the team decided that we may as well go all the way and implement HA natively in the OpenNebula front-end, implementing a consensus algorithm directly in the ‘oned’ core. The key improvement is the easier setup of the HA and the reduction of third party dependencies (no fencing, no corosync needed) and even more importantly, much less painful (in fact, completely ) failure recovery. Extensive testing is now performed on this functionality so you can add yet another 9 in your OpenNebula cloud availability!

More exciting features in 5.4 are: VM to VM and VM to Host affinity/antiaffinity using VM Groups, image persistency selection, modifiable semantics for permissions, IPv6 non SLAAC Address Ranges, Linked Clones support, improvements in monitoring drivers and much more!

Check out in the project’s development portal all the things we are still working on.

Community

Building a ecosystems is instrumental in the success of a open source project. Thanks to people interested in OpenNebula, the amount of use cases that can be built with OpenNebula keeps growing and growing.

For instance, Devuan support is now a reality in OpenNebula, with support packages that ensures a proper contextualization of this novel and refreshing linux distribution.

It is always with pleasure hearing how people learn about OpenNebula, and realize that we’d been making cloud computing easier for you for quite a while now. Also, and as always, we love to see our friends at NodeWeavers being so supportive all over this last years. Kudos!

We would like to thank everyone that is actively supporting new OpenNebula users (or more seasoned users) in our support forum. Your actions are extremely useful for the adoption of OpenNebula around the globe!

An indicator of the health of the development community is the number of open pull requests in the OpenNebula GitHub page. We do our best to review and incorporate those aligned with the OpenNebula roadmap. Thanks!

Outreach

The first US edition of the OpenNebulaConf is happening this 2017, as one of two OpenNebulaConf editions this year, one in US and the other in Europe. The US edition will take place on June 19-20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the european edition will be held in Madrid, Spain, on October 23-24.

The next editions OpenNebula TechDays events of 2017 are shaping up as special ones for the agnda and expected turnout. Madrid (hosted by Telefonica), Sofia (hosted by Storpool) and Barcelona (hosted by CSUC) registrations are almost full, check the agendas if you are interested in attending. We will be publishing details about the venues shortly, we just leave here a picture of the Madrid venue by Telefonica which is in a privileged location.

OpenNebula was present at the Enterprise at OSEN meetup, where people learn best practices as well as share with others their successes and failures with building open source products.