In the following list you can check the highlights of 3.4 organized by component (a detailed list of changes can be found here). Also you may be interested in the detailed changes introduced in the beta release (March 30th), and in the pre-release (February, 21st).

This release includes the following minor changes in OpenNebula core:

• Datastores, OpenNebula 3.4 supports multiple datastores. OpenNebula is shipped with 4 basic datastores: system, to hold images for running VMs; filesystem, to store disk images in a file form; iSCSI/LVM, to store disk images in a block device form; and VMware, a datastore specialized for the VMware hypervisor that handles the vmdk format.

• New Transfer Drivers, hosts are not tied to a single transfer mechanism (transfer driver) and now can access images from different datastores in different ways. Note that a VM can have its disks in different datastores. Also the transfers associated with persistent or save_as images have been simplified. The TM protocol and scripts have been preserved, so only minor modifications are needed to port existing TM drivers. There are also new drivers to use in combination with the Datastores: qcow2, iSCSI and an improved version of vmware that uses the vmdkfs tools.

• Clusters, by popular request we have brought back the cluster concept. The new cluster is a logic pool of resources that includes physical hosts, datastores and networks for load balancing, high availability, and high performance computing. When a VM uses resources of a cluster, its REQUIREMENTS are automatically adapted to only use hosts from that cluster.

• Restricted attributes, since OpenNebula 3.2 administrators can restrict the usage of potentially insecure attributes. These attributes can now be customized in the OpenNebula configuration file.

• XML Templates, any XML-RPC method now supports XML templates (apart from the traditional ones). You can now create networks, VMs, images using XML documents, where the elements are the template attributes (see the -x output of any one* CLI command for an example)

• Quotas, extended image quota functionality in order to support urls

OpenNebula 3.4 also includes minor bug fixes and enhancements.

There are several new features in the GUI applications:

• New Navigation Menu: Sunstone includes a new tree-like menu for resource description to easily access different parts and resources of an OpenNebula installation.

• Support for Datastores, and Clusters, Sunstone has been updated to expose the new functionality of the OpenNebula core.
• More translations, we have a new translation… Italian!
• Support for VNC in Self-Service Portal, same functionality as in Sunstone. This can be disabled in the configuration file.
• Secure Web Sockets for the VNC proxys.
• Upload of Images in Sunstone, and several performance improvements in this area.
• Improved Virtual Network Dialog, that now includes VLAN options.
• Parametric VM instantiation

OpenNebula zones has been updated to take advantage of the new functionality offered by OpenNebula core:

• Revamped Virtual Data Center (VDC). A VDC is now defined as a fully-isolated set of virtual resources within a cluster where a group of users, under the control of the VDC administrator, can create and manage compute, storage and networking capacity.
• Updated Interfaces. The Zones GUI and CLI has been updated to list the new OpenNebula resources and to handle the new VDC definition.

There have been some improvements on the Cloud APIs:

• Elastic IPs for EC2 Query API, the implementation uses association/disassociation plugins and so it can be easily adapted to the datacenter network architecture.
• The EC2 Query server includes a improved support for SSL proxys as well as custom paths.
• The OCCI server has been improved to include user/group information in resources and extended information of resources.
• Cloud Partitioning, Cloud requests can be routed to an specific cluster with its own storage and network resources to better isolate public cloud users.
• Improved logging, a new framework has been included to add logging information to the servers.
• Auth drivers New CloudAuth driver that delegates the authentication to the OpenNebula core. Therefore any OpenNebula auth driver can be used to authenticate cloud users.

OpenNebula 3.4 includes an improved EC2 hybrid driver, to support most of the EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPC.

OpenNebula 3.4 is API compatible with OpenNebula 3.x, so you should expect that applications and drivers developed for 3.x work with this release, with the exception of custom authentication drivers.

Also there have been changes in the Image Repository (now Datastore) and Transfer drivers. The protocol and command structure has been preserved, although some minor adaptations are needed to port existing TM or Image Repository drivers (more details here).

A detailed upgrade process can be found in the documentation.

For a complete set of changes to migrate from a 3.x installation please refer to the Compatibility Guide. You should also read this document if you are an OpenNebula 3.x user.

OpenNebula is released under the Apache 2.0 open source license. The complete source tree and binary packages for OpenNebula can be downloaded here.

Please report any bug or send feedback at the development portal or at the mailing list.

The documentation of OpenNebula 3.4 can be found here. The documents are in a development state so watch out, and do not hesitate to ask in the mailing list.

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, and especially to:

• Research in Motion cloud team for its feedback on the new Datastore and Zones components, and its contributions to the qcow drivers.
• Terradue 2.0 for its valuable contributions to the VMware storage drivers.
• Logica for its contributions to improve the EC2 hybrid driver.
• CloudWeavers for the translated Sunstone localization file for Italian.
• Clemson University for its contribution to the support for Elastic IPs for EC2 Query API.
• Vilnius University for its contribution to the LDAP authentication support for Sunstone.

More information about the project can be found at the project web page. You may be also interested in checking the OpenNebula Ecosystem that includes many interesting projects contributed by the community to enhance or add new features to OpenNebula.