• There is a new initiative to host OpenNebula add-ons in github. There you will find community-contributed components that may not be mature enough, or not general-purpose enough to be included in the main distribution.

• The rows in the datatables are now ordered by ID in descending order. This behaviour can be changed by user in the settings dialog or by default in sunstone-server.conf.

• New secondary groups. These work in a similar way to the unix groups: users will have a primary group, and optionally several secondary groups. This new feature is completely integrated with the current mechanisms allowing, for example, to perform the following actions:
  • The list of images visible to a user contains all the images shared within any of his groups.
  • You can deploy a VM using an Image from one of your groups, and a second Image from another group.
  • New resources are created in the owner’s primary group, but users can later change that resource’s group.
  • Users can change their primary group to any of their secondary ones.
• The quota subsystem now supports volatile disk usage and limit, see the VOLATILE_SIZE attribute here.

• There is a new default scheduling policy for both hosts and datastores: fixed. This policy will rank hosts and datastores according looking for a PRIORITY attribute that can be set manually by the administrator.

• The ''shutdown --hard'' action can be performed on UNKNOWN VMs. This means that if the guest was shutdown from within or crashed, users can still save the persistent or snapshotted disks.
• The default device prefix, DEV_PREFIX, is now 'hd' for cdrom type disks, regardless of the value set in oned.conf.

• Support for cloud init: now OpenNebula is able to contextualize guests using cloud init.
• Improvements in contextualization: ability to add INIT_SCRIPTS. Check this guide to learn how to define contextualization in your VM templates.

• Multiple system datastores: enables a much more efficient usage of the storage resources for running Virtual Machines. Read this to configure and use this new feature.
• Now that VMs can be deployed in different system DS for each host, the scheduler algorithm has been extended to take storage into account.
• The amount of storage used by OpenNebula can be limited for each Datastore using the new attribute LIMIT_MB.

• Support rename for more resources: users can now rename hosts, vnets and datastores.

• New monitorization model: changed from a pull model to a push model, thus increasing the scalability of an OpenNebula cloud. More information here.

• Ganglia drivers have been moved out of the main OpenNebula distribution and are available as an addon.
• The arguments of the im_mad poll action drivers have changed, you can see the complete reference in the Information Manager Driver guide.

# 4.2 arguments
hypervisor=$1
host_id=$2
host_name=$3
 
# 4.4 arguments
hypervisor=$1
datastore_location=$2
collectd_port=$3
monitor_push_cycle=$4
host_id=$5
host_name=$6

• Probes returning float values will be ignored (set to 0), they must be integer.

• Changes in Ceph, SCSI and LVM Datastores. Now the ''BRIDGE_LIST'' attribute is mandatory in the template used to create these type of datastores.
• CephX support. More information here.
• CDROM images are no longer cloned. This makes VM instantiation faster when a big DVD is attached.
• iscsi drivers have been moved out of the main OpenNebula distribution and are available as an addon.
• New LVM drivers model: the shared KVM model, as well as support for compressed images in LVM. Check more info on the new model here.

• AWS SDK Ruby is used instead of the Java CLI.
• The ec2.conf file was renamed to ec2_driver.default. In this file you can define the default values for ec2 instances.
• The ec2rc file has been removed. A new configuration file is available: ec2_driver.conf.
• Now AWS credentials and regions can be defined per host instead of specifying them in the driver configuration in oned.conf. You can customise these values in ec2_driver.conf. More info
• The CLOUD attribute has been deprecated, now you have to use HOST to define more than one EC2 sections in the template. More info
• The following EC2 template attributes have been removed:
  • AUTHORIZED_PORTS: we removed it because the right approach is to use SECURITY_GROUPS. What OpenNebula was doing was to modify the default security group, but we now think that a much better approach is to achieve the same using different SECURITY GROUPS and assigning VMs to them.
  • USERDATAFILE: OpenNebula 4.4 is dropping support due to a security risk, it allowed practically everyone to retrieve files from the OpenNebula front-end and stage them into an Amazon EC2 VM. The alternative is to read the file and set its contents into the USERDATA attribute, which is still supported.
• Now the VM monitoring provides more info. New tags that can be accessed inside each VM:

AWS_DNS_NAME
AWS_PRIVATE_DNS_NAME
AWS_KEY_NAME
AWS_AVAILABILITY_ZONE
AWS_PLATFORM
AWS_VPC_ID
AWS_PRIVATE_IP_ADDRESS
AWS_IP_ADDRESS
AWS_SUBNET_ID
AWS_SECURITY_GROUPS
AWS_INSTANCE_TYPE

• The IPADDRESS monitoring attribute has been renamed to AWS_PRIVATE_IP_ADDRESS.

• There is better support for custom cloud bursting drivers, you can read more in this guide.
• im_mad drivers must return PUBLIC_CLOUD=YES
• There is a new generic attribute for VMs: PUBLIC_CLOUD. This allows users to create templates that can be run locally, or in different public cloud providers. Public cloud vmm drivers must make use of this:

  DISK = [ IMAGE_ID = 7 ]

  PUBLIC_CLOUD = [
    TYPE         = "jclouds",
    JCLOUDS_DATA = "..." ]

  PUBLIC_CLOUD = [
    TYPE    = "ec2",
    AMI     = "...",
    KEYPAIR = "..." ]

• Now instance types are based on OpenNebula templates instead of files. You can still use the old system, changing the :use_file_templates: parameter in econe.conf. But using the new system is recommended, since file based templates will be removed soon.
• New implemented methods:
  • describe-snapshots
  • create-snapshot
  • delete-snapshot
  • create-tags: for instances, amis, volumes and snapshots
  • describe-tags
  • remove-tags
• Enhanced methods:
  • describe-*: one or more IDS can be specified now
  • describe-instances: includes vms in DONE for 15 minutes. You can configure this behaviour in the conf.
  • register: now you have to use this command to use an opennebula image in ec2. Missing features that will be added: add arch, kernel, extra disks metadata.
  • create-volume: now you can create a volume from an snapshot
  • run-instance: now instead of using erb files templates are based on opennebula templates. Therefore you can use restricted attributes and set permissions like any other opennebula resource.
• econe-* tools are no longer maintained, you can use euca2ools or hybridfox to test the new functionality

• Improved scalability: new parameters support in oned.conf for xmlrpc parameters. xml-rpc_server_configuration.
  • MAX_CONN: Maximum number of simultaneous TCP connections the server will maintain
  • MAX_CONN_BACKLOG: Maximum number of TCP connections the operating system will accept on the server's behalf without the server accepting them from the operating system
  • KEEPALIVE_TIMEOUT: Maximum time in seconds that the server allows a connection to be open between RPCs
  • KEEPALIVE_MAX_CONN: Maximum number of RPCs that the server will execute on a single connection
  • TIMEOUT: Maximum time in seconds the server will wait for the client to do anything while processing an RPC
• New parameter in one.vm.deploy
  • The Datastore ID of the target system datastore where the VM will be deployed. It is optional, and can be set to -1 to let OpenNebula choose the datastore.
• New method one.user.addgroup
• New method one.user.delgroup
• New method one.host.rename
• New method one.datastore.rename
• New method one.cluster.rename