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.
• 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.

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.

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.

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 re-design 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.

This release marks the beginning of the integration of a bunch of new components. There are several bugs that didn't make it for OpenNebula 3.0 Beta1 as well as some components that are still under development to integrate them with the new foundations:

• Known issues
• Pending Features, such as external authentication drivers (SSH, LDAP, and X509), accounting CLI, and quota management.

These bugs and features will be closed before OpenNebula 3.0 final.

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 3.0 Beta can be found here. The documents have been slightly re-structured to ease looking for information and it is also in beta state, so watch out!.

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.