Michael Abdou

OpenNebula v.5.8 – on the Cutting Edge

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Version 5.8 will bring cloud capabilities to the Edge

As you will have seen in our recent post, we have released a beta version of the upcoming “v.5.8 Edge”, where in addition to extending and enhancing some of the recent functionalities of “v.5.6 Blue Flash”, we are bringing to the market a collection of new capabilities that are focused on extending cloud computing to the Edge.  The ever-growing discussion around “connected data” and “IoT” is transforming the computing and infrastructure needs of organisations. The conversation is shifting away from centralised cloud infrastructure, and refocusing toward bringing the computing power closer to the users, with a concerted effort to reduce latency. The Clouds are quickly drifting to the Edge.

Historically, with OpenNebula, we have continued to remain at the forefront of cloud computing offerings, with a close eye on the needs of the User Community, while evolving along with the rapidly developing technology.  Now with v.5.8, OpenNebula will be taking a huge step toward moving to the forefront, and bringing remarkable value that will stand out from the rest.

As referenced earlier in our beta-release announcement, v.5.8 Edge will be “something to behold”!  Allow me to remind you why:

  • You will see complete, native support for LXD containers – allowing for the same capabilities as running on VM’s, but without the overhead that comes with running a separate kernel and simulating all the hardware.  You now have more options for your infrastructure.
  • Without having to change the nature of your workload, you will be able to quickly expand your cloud and build remote clusters using bare metal providers.  This feature is key in being able to build Distributed Data Centers along the edge of your expanding cloud.
  • As you build your edge environments, where hosts may be diverse, with different network configurations, the OpenNebula Scheduler will now allow for Automatic NIC selection.
  • v.5.8 Edge will offer broad Scalability Improvements – across pool management, monitoring, and the GUI – to ensure that orchestrating your edge cloud remains simple and effective.

Keep an eye out for updates surrounding the v.5.8 release, as well as, upcoming posts delving into more detail about some of its new capabilities.  And we urge you to get your hands on the beta-version to kick the tires! Let us know what you think!

 

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Tino Vazquez

OpenNebula 5.8 beta ‘Edge’ is Out!

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OpenNebula 5.8 beta (Edge) is the fifth major release of the OpenNebula 5 series. A significant effort has been applied in this release to enhance features introduced in 5.6 Blue Flash, while keeping an eye in implementing those features demanded most by the community. A major highlight of Edge is its focus to support computing on the Edge, bringing the processing power of VMs closer to the consumers to reduce latency. In this regards, Edge comes with the following major features:

  • Support for LXD. This enables low resource container orchestration. LXD containers are ideal to run on low consumption devices closer to the customers.
  • Automatic NIC selection. This enhancement of the OpenNebula scheduler will alleviate the burden of VM/container Template management in edge environments where the remote hosts can be potentially heterogeneous, with different network configurations.
  • Distributed Data Centers. This feature is key for the edge cloud. OpenNebula now offers the ability to use bare metal providers to build remote clusters in a breeze, without needing to change the workload nature. We are confident that this is a killer feature that sets OpenNebula apart from the direct competitors in the space.
  • Scalability improvements. Orchestrating an edge cloud will be demanding in terms of the number of VMs, containers and hypervisors to manage. OpenNebula 5.8 brings to the table a myriad of improvements to the monitoring, pool management and GUI, to deliver a smooth user experience in large scale environments.

This OpenNebula release is named after the edges of nebulas. Nebulas are diffuse objects, and their edges can be considered vacuum. However, they are very thick, so they appear to be dense. This is the aim of OpenNebula 5.8, to provide computing power on a wide geographic surface to offer services closer to customers, building a cloud managed from a single portal over very thin infrastructure. There’s an Edge Nebula on the Freelancer videogame.

The OpenNebula team is now transitioning 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. Also note that being a beta, there is no migration path from the previous stable version (5.6.1) nor a migration path to the final stable version (5.8.0). A list of open issues can be found in the GitHub development portal.

Relevant Links

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Michael Abdou

TechDay Frankfurt Hosted by Interactive Network / EuroCloud – 14FEB19

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Join us in Frankfurt, Germany for our next OpenNebula TechDay

Both Interactive Network and EuroCloud Germany will be hosting our next OpenNebula TechDay, in Frankfurt, Germany on February 14, 2019.

We are starting off the year, heads down and focused on getting OpenNebula v.5.8 ready for release.  A beta-release is not far away now, and what better way to get first-hand details about new capabilities?!  Join us, together with Interactive Network and EuroCloud Germany, for our FREE day-long seminar where we will provide hands-on training, share use cases and insights on experiences, and have the opportunity to discuss “What’s New” in OpenNebula.

Check the following links for registration and agenda information:

Agenda and Venue

Event Registration

Read more

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Michael Abdou

OpenNebula v.5.8 – Call for Translations!

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OpenNebula v.5.8 is close…

We are launching a “Call for Translations” as we prepare the release of OpenNebula v.5.8.  Any help that you can provide in helping to translate for our Sunstone GUI would be of enormous value – and it is very easy to do!

You can translate “one string at a time”.

Existing translations can be updated and new translations submitted through our project site at Transifex:

https://www.transifex.com/opennebula/one/

The “Call for Translations” will end on January 28, 2019.  And translated languages reaching a good level of completion will be included in the official v.5.8 release.

We appreciate your collaboration!!

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Michael Abdou

OpenNebula 2018: Year in Review

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Closing out 2018…and welcoming in 2019!!

2018 has been another exciting year for OpenNebula. It has brought continued developments and advancements in the OpenNebula product capabilities. At the same time, we’ve seen a fervor and a steady commitment by the User Community which continues to bring unmatched value. At OpenNebula Systems, we have our sights set on continued improvement for 2019, and we are excited about several promising, emerging developments. But again, one of the key dynamics of the project is that we wouldn’t be able to grow without you.

For that reason, one of the recent developments in the community has been our request for your participation in our 2018 User Survey.  This is a simple vehicle to allow us to learn about the use cases, platforms, and overarching technical needs of the OpenNebula User Community.  We look to remain in synch with your needs, and to develop alongside with you. Fill it out, and share your thoughts!

Speaking of developments…

Among the various version releases this year, we released version 5.6 “Blue Flash” with a huge set of improvements both at the core level, as well as for vCenter integration. And from there, we have jumped right into focused development on the upcoming version 5.8.  In it, we have been working on many different features – a long-awaited support for LXD containers, being one of them.

2018 has seen a certain dedicated focus on the emerging developments surrounding Edge Computing, and while we have been working closely with customers and partners, learning the details of evolving use cases, we have also made developments around integrations with OpenNebula along “the edge”.  Earlier this year, we released an initial prototype of “oneProvision”, allowing users to provision and deploy bare-metal resources directly within an OpenNebula cluster.  Upcoming development of oneProvision will include being able to deploy not only one host, but a cluster of hosts.  At the same time, we partnered with Packet to demonstrate our continued focus in bringing capabilities to the edge.

Recent releases of new capabilities like miniONE and VirtualNetwork Scheduler, and the Image Converter to/from VMDK and QCOW2 all demonstrate our driven effort to making OpenNebula the easiest-to-use platform out there.

The “Calendar of Events”

In 2018, we held several OpenNebula TechDay events throughout Europe – in Sofia hosted by StorPool, in Barcelona hosted by CSUC, and in Frankfurt hosted by LINBIT – and in the US – in Santa Clara, CA hosted by Hitachi Vantara and in Cambridge, MA hosted by OpenNebula Systems.  We also held our OpenNebulaConf in Amsterdam.  We thank our sponsors and hosts for collaborating to put these events together.

Events schedule in 2019

The lineup for OpenNebula TechDays for this coming year will tentatively be in the following locations, with dates and details to be determined:

  • Frankfurt
  • Barcelona
  • Vienna
  • Sofia
  • Boston

And plan to attend our 2019 OpenNebulaConf in Barcelona on October 21-22, 2019.

Great support from the Community

Lastly, as we continuously try to make clear, the OpenNebula project would not have the vitality nor the reach it has if it weren’t for our dedicated User Community.  We’ve seen a continued growth of OpenNebula Champions.  Throughout the year, users have taken the time to publish tutorials like these from Pandora FMS, Virtuozzo 7, and CSUC.  Our OpenNebula Blog has been used by many from the Community to publish share insight and experiences. This year, we also created our Partner Ecosystem, another instrument to show and share integrations between ONE and other great technologies.

This has been an exciting year for OpenNebula! We give you our utmost thanks, and we look forward to our collaboration going into 2019!!

Stay Connected!

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Michael Abdou

OpenNebula Newsletter – December 2018

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Our newsletter contains the highlights of the OpenNebula project and its Community throughout the month.

Technology

Several important items and functionalities have been worked on or released this month, which are definitely worth mentioning:

  • We released the powerful, yet simple tool called “miniONE“.  With miniOne, you can now stand up a complete OpenNebula environment on a single host with just one command.  And it takes no longer than a few minutes.  Check out the detailed miniONE blog post.
  • We have released a new appliance onto the OpenNebula Marketplace with a pre-installed WordPress 5.0 service.  Take a look at the quick walk-through on the forum post and check it out!
  • We have been firmly focused on our testing and validation of the LXD container support, along with vCenter driver updates, and we are getting very close to releasing a beta version for OpenNebula 5.8.  Keep your eyes peeled!

Community

As the holiday season approaches, and we coast into the new year, we give a big thanks to the User Community for your continued support and enthusiasm in pushing OpenNebula forward, and for sharing your experiences and insight.

Outreach

And as we look toward the new year, we have been working fervently on the OpenNebula plan for 2019:

  • We sent out our 2018 User Survey with the hopes of getting useful insight into your needs and suggested areas of focus. Your feedback is extremely valuable, so we urge you to fill it out, if you haven’t already.  (It takes 5 minutes, max).
  • We will soon be wrapping up our OpenNebula TechDay schedule for 2019. We sent out a Call for Hosts, and are working on finalizing our schedule.  There’s still time to submit your request to host a TechDay of your own.

We wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and look forward to ringing in the new year together!

Best wishes, and Stay Connected!

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Cristian Scurtescu

OpenNebula with 2-Factor Authentication

The Scientific IT Services (SIS) of ETH Zurich offers  scientific computing, research data management and analysis support, as well as software engineering expertise to ETH researchers.

To support the personalized health research community, the SIS built and actively develops further “Leonhard Med”: a secure and powerful high-performance platform designed for computing, storage, management, interoperability and controlled sharing of confidential research data (e.g., biomedical patient data). Leonhard Med is operated by the Scientific IT Services (SIS) of ETH Zurich and it is part of the emerging BioMedIT national network whose role is to provide secure and interoperable data and computing infrastructures for research projects in the Swiss personalized health programs

While being in production use since beginning of 2018, Leonhard Med must be constantly developed further to keep up with new and changing requirements within a rapidly, evolving scientific environment. For example, our customers needed additional services that could not be hosted on a regular HPC infrastructure (e.g., databases, terminal servers, webapps or data management applications). This brought us to the idea of providing a cloud solution. We had some previous experience running vCloud Director (VMware) and we also had a close look to OpenStack but both came with a high price tag either in terms of license costs or manpower. Luckily one of our consultants introduced OpenNebula to us and after a few weeks of testing we fell in love with it. It met all our requirements and we found it quite intuitive and easy to maintain and support. We were actually looking for a lightweight but powerful product that is easy to maintain with few IT personnel resources and on the other hand we were aware of the challenges lying ahead of us when integrating OpenNebula into the secure environment of Leonhard Med.

We began deploying and integrating OpenNebula almost 4 months ago, using 2 physical hosts from the cluster (new hardware) and set-up the OpenNebula and 2x KVM nodes on them. We now have a fully functional and productive installation ready to serve our consumer needs and we achieved this with only a few sysadmins working on the project part time time over the four months. Our private cloud running OpenNebula sits in a restricted zone without Internet access. The access is done via proxy servers using 2 factor authentication and Sunstone is only reachable via socks proxy. For reproducibility purposes, the installation and all processes running inside the cloud has been automated with Ansible.

Challenges: We did face a couple of challenges during installation and later on during the upgrade to v5.6. For example, we had to search for a couple of ruby gems, built rpms and move them into our secured environment. These were mostly related to our network security restrictions. Nevertheless, as a “nice to have” I’d include all dependencies required during installation or upgrade within OpenNebula’s repository for RH/CentOS platforms.

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Jan Orel

miniONE – Install OpenNebula with a Single command!

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This post is about a simple tool called miniONE, which allows you to easily install OpenNebula on a single host from the freshly deployed system to the ready-to-use OpenNebula installation just by a single command.

Let’s say that you just want to check out how OpenNebula looks like when starting evaluation or you want to see if something particular is done in v5.6. This might be the case when you can use miniONE.

So, just get it:

$ wget https://github.com/OpenNebula/minione/raw/v5.6.0/minione

and run it:

$ sudo bash minione

At first, there needs to be some checks done. You can see all of them by running with –verbose.

$ sudo bash minione --verbose

### Checks & detection
Checking distribution and version [CentOS 7] OK
Checking cpu virtualization capabilities OK
Check free disk space OK
Using local interface [ens3] OK
Checking directories from previous installation OK
Checking user from previous installation OK
Checking sshd service is running OK
Checking bridge-utils are installed SKIP will try to install
Checking minionebr interface is not present OK
Check given VN 172.16.100.0/24 is not routed OK
Checking SELinux OK
Checking for present ssh key SKIP
Generating ssh keypair in /root/.ssh/id_rsa OK
Checking presence of the market app: "CentOS 7 - KVM" OK

Mainly you need to run it on a supported system — Centos 7 and recently Ubuntus so far. Then, you need CPU capable to perform virtualization, some free space to allocate the images and virtual machines itself, etc.

It may happen that you hit some non critical check to fail

### Checks & detection
Checking directories from previous installation FAILED

But you might try to force it using -f.

$ sudo bash minione -f

### Checks & detection
Checking directories from previous installation IGNORED will be deleted

Once you get through that, you may start the installation.

### Main deployment steps:
Purge previous installation
Configure bridge minionebr with IP 172.16.100.1/24
Enable NAT over ens3
Using ssh public key /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Install OpenNebula version 5.6

Do you agree? [yes/no]:

### Installation
Install bridge-utils OK
Creating bridge interface minionebr OK
Restarting network OK
Enabling ipv4 forward OK
Configuring nat using iptables OK
Saving iptables changes OK
Installing DNSMasq OK
Starting DNSMasq OK
Configuring repositories OK
Installing epel OK
Installing OpenNebula packages OK
Installing ruby gems OK
Installing OpenNebula node packages OK

### Configuration
Switching onegate endpoint in oned.conf OK
Switching scheduler interval to 10sec OK
Setting initial password for current user and oneadmin OK
Starting opennebula services OK
Checking OpenNebula is working OK
Disabling ssh from virtual network OK
Adding localhost ssh key to known_hosts OK
Testing ssh connection to localhost OK
Add ssh key to oneadmin user OK
Updating datastores, TM_MAD=qcow2, SHARED=yes OK
Creating host OK
Creating virtual network OK
Exporting [CentOS 7 – KVM] from marketplace to local datastore OK
Updating template OK

What is happening? Apart from the installation itself, which simply adds the repositories and installs the OpenNebula packages, some configuration changes must be done. Above all, the networking needs be prepared to somehow allow you to connect to the virtual machines later.

For that purpose the bridge interface is created with dedicated network segment and NAT is configured on the installing host. Also, DNS server (DNSMasq) is started for the virtual machines.

miniONE comes with default parameter values for most cases. See them all in the Help:

$ bash minione --help
-h --help                           List of supported arguments
--version [5.6]                     Specify OpenNebula version
-f --force                          Skip non-fatal validation errors
                                    (e.g., traces of existing inst.)
-v --verbose                        Be verbose
--yes                               Don't ask
--password [random generated]       Initial password for oneadmin
--ssh-pubkey [~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub]    User ssh public key
--bridge-interface [minionebr]      Bridge interface for private networking
--nat-interface [first net device]  Interface to configure for NAT
--vnet-address [172.16.100.0]       Virtual Network address
--vnet-netmask [255.255.255.0]      Virtual Network netmask
--vnet-gateway [172.16.100.1]       Virtual Network gateway (i.e. bridge IP)
--vnet-ar-ip-start [172.16.100.1]   Virtual Network AR start IP
--vnet-ar-ip-count [100]            Virtual Network AR size
--marketapp-name [CentOS 7 - KVM]   Name of Marketplace appliance to import
--vm-password [opennebula]          Root password for virtual machine

Before the installation finishes, it also bootstraps the OpenNebula to be ready to use. At first it enables KVM hypervisor on localhost and downloads one appliance from the market place. So, once that is complete, you may easily login using the printed credentials:

### Report
OpenNebula 5.6 was installed
Sunstone (the webui) is runninng on:
  http://192.168.100.101:9869/
Use following to login:
  user: oneadmin
  password: o6ARsMAdGe

And that’s it! It won’t take us to Mars, but it might be handy, nonetheless.

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Michael Abdou

OpenNebula Survey 2018 – Share your feedback

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Just a few minutes of your time…

As we continue to focus on improvements of OpenNebula, we need direction from you, the User Community.

Please take a few minutes to fill out this OpenNebula Survey 2018 – to help us understand how you are using OpenNebula, and what you need going forward.  All information collected is confidential, and will not be shared.

Many, many thanks!

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Michael Abdou

OpenNebula Newsletter – November 2018

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Our newsletter contains the highlights of the OpenNebula project and its Community throughout the month.

Technology

There are a lot of OpenNebula features currently being worked on that deserve some attention:

  • We are working on an upcoming feature with the aim to simplify the management of VM templates that can be deployed on multiple clusters – by creating an automated selection process for the VM networks.  Check out the recent post.
  • Migrating workloads both to and from KVM to VMware hypervisors will soon be as simple as bread and butter for breakfast. Check out the recent post.
  • We are also working on a “self-provisioning” method for Virtual Networks.  No longer will Virtual Networks be created only by cloud administrators, but rather, end-users can be given the ability to make changes at the logic level, like changes to IP ranges, to the DNS server, etc.

Keep an eye out for the upcoming version 5.8!

Community

November has been an exciting month for the User Community.

Outreach

  • We currently have our 2019 OpenNebula TechDay Call for Hosts open.  Take a look at your calendars, and think about planning a TechDay of your own!
  • We want your feedback!!
    • In the coming weeks, we are going to be sending out an OpenNebula survey, with the intention of learning a bit about how you are using OpenNebula.  Please plan to take the time to fill it out, as its purpose is for us to be able to serve you better!
    • If you attended the OpenNebulaConf in Amsterdam, and you haven’t submitted your feedback survey, please do so, and let us know what you think!

Let’s welcome in December!

Stay Connected!

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