~~NOTOC~~
November 18th, 2009. The OpenNebula team is happy to announce the release candidate of OpenNebula 1.4. This release is aimed at testers, community members and cloud enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 1.4 can fully replace OpenNebula 1.2 deployments.
====== Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are...======
* EC2 Query API interface for building OpenNebula-based clouds
* OCCI interface for building OpenNebula-based clouds
* Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
* Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
* Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
* Easy integration with your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
* Support block devices as VM images.
* Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
* A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples
A detailed [[http://dev.opennebula.org/versions/show/4| list of changes and bug fixes included in OpenNebula 1.4 RC, can be found in dev.opennebula.org]]
===== General =====
* **New documentation**, hopefully clearer than the previous one
* **New [[http://dev.opennebula.org|development and collaborative portal]]**, we have migrated our development portal to Redmine (and we are quite happy with it!). A new section hosting third-party projects is available to the community
===== Core =====
* **Multiple user support**, you can now define multiple users each one with her own access rights to the virtual infrastructure
* **New Hook system**, that executes custom scripts on specific events. You can easily pass VM-related attributes to your hooks
* **New Context support**, to pass custom data (including information from other VMs, files or directories) to a virtual machine at boot time
* **New and extended database schemas**, support for direct access to the database is now deprecated. Applications should use the new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) facility
* **Improved VM life-cycle**, to gracefully handle VM information //block-outs// and deletes in any state
* Support **block devices** for VM images
* New **LVM-based** transfer manager scripts
===== Drivers =====
* **New VMware** drivers, including information and transfer using the VMware's VI API.
* Re-design of the driver subsystem to improve its scalability and performance
* Improved **Xen** and **KVM** drivers
===== Virtual Infrastructure Interfaces =====
* **New OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) framework**, that exposes the complete OpenNebula functionality
* **New XML-RPC methods**, that includes user authentication, pool access and the new user methods. Now no access to the DB is required, applications should start migrating to the new interfaces.
* **Libvirt interface** has been moved to the libvirt repository
* **Re-implementation of the CLI** to make use of the new interface
* **New CLI for user management**
===== Hybrid Cloud Components =====
* New **ElasticHosts** drivers
* **Support for multiple EC2 clouds**
* **Hybrid cloud drivers** has been migrated to the new driver engine
===== Cloud Interfaces =====
* **New EC2 Query-API** service on top of OpenNebula. The service has been implemented using the new OCA facility. The service exposes a subset of the Amazon's Query API.
* **Amazon S3 subset**, the EC2 Query service include functions to upload and register images to the OpenNebula EC2-Query cloud
* **EC2 Query Tools** to use the EC2 query service, you can potentially use any other EC2-Query compatible tool or utility with minor modifications
* **New OCCI** service on top of OpenNebula. This new interface implements the current draft of the OGF standard
* **OCCI tools** a set of command line tools to use OCCI based clouds
====== Getting OpenNebula 1.4 ======
The complete [[http://downloads.opennebula.org | source tree for OpenNebula can be freely downloaded]]. The compilation has been tested on the main linux distributions, please check the [[documentation:archives:rel1.4:notes|platform notes]] for more information.
===== About OpenNebula =====
Please refer to the OpenNebula ** [[:documentation:documentation|documentation guides to install and configure your system]] **. More information:
* [[:about:about|About the project, general benefits and features]]
* [[:documentation:faq|FAQ]]
* [[:software:ecosystem|Ecosystem]]