OpenNebula 3.0 Final (Codename Iris)

October 3rd, 2011. The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the availability of OpenNebula 3.0. The third generation of OpenNebula introduces many new components and features for the complete and comprehensive management of clouds and virtualized data centers, and constitutes a significant step forward in functionality. OpenNebula 3.0 provides the more feature-rich, open-source and production-ready alternative for building an IaaS Cloud. With this release, OpenNebula reaches its maturity in functionality, stability, adoption and community engagement.

This has been a long trip since 1.0 more than three years ago, and the team wants to specially thank the OpenNebula community members for making this happen, for their support and commitment, and for their wonderful contributions to the project.

OpenNebula 3.0 is suitable for production environments. Most of the new innovative features have been developed to fulfill the needs of leading IT organizations running production environments. We recommend those currently running previous versions of OpenNebula to upgrade.

As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The IRIS Nebula (NGC 7023, Caldwell 4) is a bright reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus.

What's New in OpenNebula 3.0

In this list you can check the highlights of 3.0 by component:

OpenNebula Core

Most of the changes in the new release have been done in the OpenNebula core (oned) and libraries to support the following new features:

Groups to better manage users and their virtual resources, and to create isolated compartments within the same cloud, supporting flexible multi-tenancy.

Flexible Access Control List System that let cloud administrators to control resources and operations in a user or group basis. This allows to implement multiple sharing scenarios with role management and fine grain permission granting.

New Authentication Aystems, OpenNebula supports two new authentication drivers based in x509 Certficates and SSH keys. The x509 authentication can be used with the cloud servers EC2 and OCCI

Improved Quotas the quota system has been redesign with significant efficiency improvements. Also disk quotas are now avilable.

Virtual Machine Templates can now be stored and instantiated multiple times without the need of storing the VM template files. As any other resource VM templates can be shared by users of the same group.

New VLAN model that can be managed through OpenvSwitch and 802.1Q tagging

Simple Firewall for VMs to specify a set of black/white TCP/UDP ports.

There are other important internal changes in the OpenNebula core:

Image Repository that is now handled with its own manager component and a scriptable set of drivers to easily tune its operations.

DB Versioning and Schema where specific tables are used to store DB version numbers. A new tool to upgrade from previous OpenNebula versions has been developed. The internal DB schema of the database has been moved to a schema-free format (document oriented). This has greatly improved the flexibility of the code at no performance cost.

Accounting and Monitoring, there is a new component that extracts information from the OpenNebula DB that structures the information to easily generate accounting reports and to simplify its integration with billing tools.

There are lots of other minor features, like improvements in the libvirt driver to include additional parameters, or the ability to edit resource templates (hosts, images or VM templates). Please check the development portal for a full description.

SunStone

Since the last release, SunStone has greatly improved its stability and usability. With this new release there are also some important new features

Usage graphics and statistics with cloudwatch-like functionality to track the usage of your virtual and physical resources.
OpenNebula new functionality can be accessed through the GUI
VNC support providing a convenient way to debug or setup VMs
Views configurations for users and groups. The view (set of tabs) available to a user or group of users can now be defined. Site admins can easily tune the interface for regular users.
Plugin support to easily extend SunStone with additional tabs to better integrate Cloud and VM management with each site own operations and tools.
Support to use X509 certificates

OpenNebula Zones and VDCs

The OpenNebula Zones component (oZones) allows for the centralized management of multiple instances of OpenNebula (zones). These zones can be effectively shared through the Virtual Data Center (VDC) abstraction. A VDC is a set of virtual resources (images, VM templates, virtual networks and virtual machines) and users that use and control those virtual resources.

OpenNebula Zones lets you easily scale your installations by deploying a powerful multi-tier architecture, and, thanks to the VDC, delivers infrastructure as a service to get even more utilization, agility and efficiency from IT resources in common enterprise cloud scenarios.

oZones comes with a CLI and a fully functional web interface to easily add, remove and manage OpenNebula Zones.

Migrating from OpenNebula 2.x and 3.0 Betas

There has been a bump in the major version number of OpenNebula. There are three main areas that need attention when upgrading your installation (if you are an OpenNebula 2.x user):

Database, The DB schema has been redesigned from scratch, to ease the transition you should use the onedb tool to automatically upgrade your system.
User Interface, There are minor changes in the CLI and user interface. The most notably ones are that now you can reuse names, and that images and networks can not be referenced by name, use NETWORK_ID and IMAGE_ID instead.
API, New methods have been included for the new features. Also there are a few changes in the current xml-rpc methods.

For a complete set of changes to migrate from a 2.x installation please refer to the new Compatibility Guide. You should also read this document if you are an OpenNebula 2.x user.

Known Issues and Pending Features

There are a couple of known issues and limitations in 3.0, you can check them in the documentation.

Getting the Software

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.

Documentation

The documentation of OpenNebula 3.0 can be found here. The documents have been slightly re-structured to ease looking for information.

Acknowledgements

The OpenNebula project would like to thank the community for their effort and valuable contributions that made possible this release, and our private sponsor, C12G Labs, for its support and software contributions.

The OpenNebula project especially appreciates the contribution of the following individuals: Ted Hesselroth and Steven Timm (development of the x509 support); Nikolai; Gian Umberto Uri; Alberto Picon; Robert Parrott; Steffen Neumann; Fabian Wenk; Holger Gantikow and Christoph Raible (also for the wonderful linux-magazine article); Patrice Lachance; and Shi Jin.

We would also like to thank those organizations and people leading the new OpenNebula ecosystem projects from our last stable release: Rodrigue Chakode (SVMSched); Florian Feldhaus, Piotr Kasprzak and Hayati Bice (OCCI 1.1 and CDMI); Nikolay (OpenVZ); Frank Doelitzscher (StudiCloud); and Hector Sanjuan, Pablo Donaire and David Rodriguez (VirtualBox).

Finally we appreciate the effort of the maintainers of OpenNebula packages in the main Linux distributions: Shawn Starr (Fedora); Peter Linell and Robert Schweikert (openSUSE); and Damien Raude-Morvan (Debian and Ubuntu).

About OpenNebula

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.