~~NOTOC~~

Frequently Asked Questions

**Position in the Virtualization and Cloud Ecosystem** * [[#what_is_opennebula | What is OpenNebula?]] * [[#how_does_opennebula_compare_with_other_cloud_platforms | How does OpenNebula compare with other Cloud platforms?]] * [[#is_opennebula_designed_for_hpc_services | Is OpenNebula Designed for HPC Services?]] * [[#what_is_the_relation_of_opennebula_with_the_reservoir_project | What is the relation of OpenNebula with the RESERVOIR project?]] * [[#can_be_opennebula_integrated_with_other_components | Can be OpenNebula integrated with other components?]] * [[#is_opennebula_a_research_technology|Is OpenNebula a research technology?]] * [[#how_is_opennebula_funded|How is OpenNebula Funded?]] **Functionality and Capabilities** * [[#how_are_networks_managed_by_opennebula | How are networks managed by OpenNebula?]] * [[#how_are_images_managed_by_opennebula | How are images managed by OpenNebula?]] * [[#Which_hypervisors_can_OpenNebula_use | Which hypervisors can OpenNebula use?]] * [[#what_interfaces_does_opennebula_provide | What interfaces does OpenNebula provide?]] * [[#what_commands_does_opennebula_provide | What commands does OpenNebula provide?]] * [[#which_scheduling_policies_can_opennebula_enforce | Which scheduling policies can OpenNebula enforce?]] * [[#which_software_requirements_do_OpenNebula_have | Which software requirements do OpenNebula have?]] * [[#do_you_accept_feature_requests_and_ideas_for_next_releases? | Do you accept feature requests and ideas for next releases?]] **Development and Support** * [[#which_support_levels_are_provided | Which support levels are provided? ]] * [[#how_is_the_software_licensed | How is the software licensed?]] * [[#Why_Apache_license | Why Apache license?]] * [[#can_i_help_develop_opennebula | Can I help develop OpenNebula?]] ====== Position in the Virtualization and Cloud Ecosystem ====== ==== What is OpenNebula? ==== OpenNebula provides a **simple but feature-rich and flexible solution** for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable on-premise enterprise clouds in existing infrastructures. OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as **Private Cloud**. OpenNebula supports **Hybrid Cloud** to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports **Public Clouds** by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management. ==== How does OpenNebula compare with other Cloud platforms? ==== OpenNebula focuses on **Data Center virtualization** by bringing all the **rich functionality** and **integration capabilities** required for the comprehensive management of virtualized infrastructures. OpenNebula is **vendor neutral**, **platform agnostic** with **broad infrastructure support**, allowing to leverage existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. Other open-source solutions mainly focus on public cloud features and do not realize the full potential of virtualization in the Data Center to enable a feature-rich private cloud. OpenNebula does not only bring an open-source implementation of the most common public cloud interfaces, but also [[:documentation:features|the latest innovations]] in the management of virtualized data centers for the deployment of cutting edge on-premise IaaS clouds in your existing infrastructure. OpenNebula is **fully Open Source Cloud Software**. OpenNebula is not a feature or performance limited edition of an Enterprise version. OpenNebula is truly open, and not open core. ==== Is OpenNebula Designed for HPC Services? ==== **OpenNebula efficiently manages any service workload**, not only HPC services. The management of the VMs is OS and service agnostic, following a black-box approach. Because we have an extensive experience in the HPC and Grid domains, most of the use cases in the documentation are focused on providing support to computing environments, but that does not mean that OpenNebula is only for HPC. In fact, you can also find several examples and use cases from other domains. ==== What is the relation of OpenNebula with the RESERVOIR project? ==== **OpenNebula was enhanced to meet the demanding requirements of the business use cases** in the [[http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu/|RESERVOIR]] Project, flagship of European research initiatives in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. More information is available in this [[http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/A44F6256BB697FCE852574E10052DDEE|IBM Technical Paper]]. OpenNebula is one the main technology spin-offs of this leading project. ==== Can be OpenNebula integrated with other components? ==== **OpenNebula is modular-by-design to allow its integration with any other tool or service in the virtualization and Cloud ecosystem, and management tool in the data center**. Its flexible and open architecture allows its integration with capacity managers, virtualization platforms, virtual image managers, service managers... In the ecosystem page we keep information about the relationship of OpenNebula with the different stakeholders in the virtualization and cloud computing ecosystem. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are working on a cloud or virtualization infrastructure using OpenNebula or developing a tool which extends its capabilities. ==== Is OpenNebula a research technology? ==== **OpenNebula is an enterprise-ready solution for building any type of Cloud deployment**, either in scientific or in business environments. OpenNebula releases are tested to assess their scalability and robustness in large scale VM deployments, and under stress conditions. ==== How is OpenNebula funded? ==== The development of OpenNebula is funded by several [[:about:sponsors|sponsors]] that include public funding agencies and commercial entities. The community is being managed by C12G Labs. ====== Functionality and Capabilities ====== ==== How are networks managed by OpenNebula? ==== OpenNebula contains a built-in **Virtual Network Manager** that enables the mapping of virtual networks onto physical ones. In this way, physical networks can be breakdown into smaller networks that, in turn, can be used to isolate virtual machines in different virtual networks and to communicate those machines in the same isolated virtual networks. ==== How are images managed by OpenNebula? ==== OpenNebula uses datastores to store disk images for VMs. A datastore is a storage medium typically backed by SAN/NAS servers. Virtual Machines are composed by images that holds their virtualized hard drives. This images need to be accessible from the cluster nodes so virtual machines can be executed. To aid in this process, OpenNebula **Transfer Manager** allows for a flexible configuration of the image repository and their access from the cluster nodes, being that via **NFS**, **SFTP**, **HTTP** or a combination of them. Additionally, **Transfer Manager** architecture permits extensions to deal with other file transport methods. ==== Which hypervisors can OpenNebula use? ==== Physical cluster nodes can have **KVM**, **Xen**, or **VMware** hypervisors installed. OpenNebula can run virtual machines and gather information about physical and virtual resources from all these hypervisors. The ecosystem additionally provides support for Hyper-V, OpenVZ and VirtualBox. Additionally, OpenNebula can interface with **Amazon EC2** to build hybrid cloud computing deployments. ==== What interfaces does OpenNebula provide? ==== Native API of OpenNebula is offered via **XML-RPC** and its Java and Ruby OCA bindings. Managing of virtual machines, physical cluster nodes and virtual networks can be accomplished using this interface. OpenNebula implements the **EC2 Query, OGF OCCI and vCloud APIs** to demonstrate its ** support for the development of new Cloud interfaces**. ==== What commands does OpenNebula provide? ==== There are several commands to control the basic aspects of cluster virtualization: **onevm** permits the managing of virtual machines (creation, deployment, migration, stopping, resuming, saving, etc), **onehost** enables the administrator to manage the physical cluster nodes (create, enable, disable, delete, listing, etc), **onevnet** allows the management of virtual networks (create, list, show, delete), **oneuser** enables the administrator to manage the users (create, list, show, delete), **oneimage** for the management of images... OpenNebula Sunstone, the new cloud operation center, can be also used to graphically operate a cloud instance. ==== Which scheduling policies can OpenNebula enforce? ==== Currently, OpenNebula scheduler provides an implementation of the Rank Scheduling Policy which aims to prioritize those resources more suitable for the VM, allowing the definition of workload and resource-aware allocation policies such as packing, striping, load-aware, affinity-aware… The built in scheduler can be easily replaced as it is a separated process communicating with the core with a straightforward API. ==== Which software requirements do OpenNebula have? ==== There are very few dependencies on an OpenNebula installation. Please check the platform notes of the last OpenNebula version. The project also provides packages for the most common Linux distributions. ==== Do you accept feature requests and ideas for next releases? ==== [[:community:community | Yes, please have a look at the community page]]. ====== Development and Support ====== ==== Which support levels are provided? ==== [[support:support|Best effort and commercial support are available]] from the developers. ==== How is the software licensed? ==== OpenNebula is distributed and licensed for use under the terms of the [[http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 | Apache License, Version 2.0.]]. ==== Why Apache license? ==== Apache is a commercial-friendly open source license. The **Apache license allows any Cloud and virtualization player to innovate using the technology without the requirement to contribute those innovations back to the open source community**, so protecting them from the "viral infection" problem often associated with other licenses, such as GPL. ==== Can I help develop OpenNebula? ==== Yes, we look forward to your contributions. There are many different ways to [[http://www.opennebula.org/community:contribute|contribute to OpenNebula development]]. Moreover, there are a lot of components to develop in the virtualization and Cloud ecosystem in order to complement OpenNebula capabilities. If you want to contribute new functional components, please visit the [[:community:ecosystem|OpenNebula ecosystem section]].