OpenNebula 3.8 Beta (3.7.80)

October 9th, 2012. The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the immediate availability of OpenNebula 3.8 Beta (Twin Jet). This release brings many new features and stabilizes features that were introduced in previous versions.

OpenNebula 3.8 enhances the integration with VMware and KVM, which are the most widely used hypervisors in OpenNebula clouds, and with heterogeneous infrastructures using different hypervisors. Twin Jet features an improved storage VMware interface with native support for VMFS and integration with cgroups and SPICE on KVM deployments.

This new version seamlessly integrates with the new Virtual Router in the OpenNebula marketplace to provide L3 services based on the OpenNebula virtual networks.

Twin Jet also enhances the EC2 Query API server, which now provides a complete implementation of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) and keypairs, along with other minor enhancements to be more compliant with the Amazon EC2 specification. The OCCI cloud API now brings new actions and hotplugging functionality.

Finally, OpenNebula 3.8 extends actions in the virtual machine life-cycle to enhance robustness and integration capabilities, and brings new features in the Sunstone and Self-service portals.

An important effort has been made to synchronize the packaging format used by the OpenNebula project and those used by the Linux distributions. We hope that this will make even more easier to get and set OpenNebula up and running.

There are also other new features already implemented and ready but not merged with master. These features will be available in the final release of OpenNebula 3.8. Note that this is a beta release aimed at testers and developers to try the new features.

As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Twin Jet Nebula (Minkowski 2-9, abbreviated M2-9 ) is a planetary nebula that was discovered by Rudolph Minkowski in 1947. It is located about 2,100 light-years away from Earth.

What's New in OpenNebula 3.8

In the following list you can check the highlights of 3.8 organized by component (a detailed list of changes can be found here):

OpenNebula Core

This release includes the following changes in OpenNebula core:

Enhanced VMware support through a new set of Datastore and Transfer Manager (TM) drivers. These new drivers enable the implementation of multiple storage solutions and brings native support for VMFS.

Support for cgroups on KVM. The kernel cgroups facility is used to enforce VM CPU usage as described in the VM Template.

Support for SPICE on KVM. Users may take advantage of the SPICE protocol to define access to the VMs.

Virtual Routers. There is a new ready to use network appliance that implements a virtual router. This Virtual Router is fully integrated with OpenNebula and uses the information defined in the Virtual Network template to provide basic L3 services like NATting, DHCP, DNS…

Poweroff. A VM in poweroff state is similar to suspended, but without a checkpoint file, so it can be restarted to immediately boot it in the same Host. There is also a new poweroff action associated to this new state.

Pre and post migration driver actions. The new actions allow to easily integrate new storage backends. Usually customs actions must be performed before and after a live-migration, this new driver actions can be used to implement them.

Minor CLI improvements and template-less creation. The command line tools have undergone several minor changes and features a new set of options to create VMs and images in a single line.

Datastore location per cluster. Heterogeneous clouds with different hypervisors may simplify its deployment by setting the datastore location on the hosts per each cluster, instead of doing it globally as in previous versions.

More variables in CONTEXT. User related data (user name, group id and name) can now be used directly, without the need to include and parse the whole user template.

More robust resubmit. Clean up operations are now synchronized with the VM transitions, making the resubmit operation safer and more robust.

EC2 Query Server

The EC2 Query API has been greatly improved in Twin-Jet, including:

Implementation of the EBS interface. Create, attach and detach volumes to EC2 instances
Implementation of the keypair interface. Keypairs are stored in the user template in the OpenNebula DB, and injected in the VM instances through the contextualization process.
Although EC2 Query API server can be interfaced with any of the EC2 tools, the OpenNebula econe client tools have been also improved and extended.

OCCI Server

The OCCI API has been improved in Twin-Jet, including:

Implementation of new actions and hot plugging functionality

Sunstone & Self Service Portals

There are several new features in the GUI applications:

Improved VNC proxy system that reduces the number of opened ports
Plot of user consumption can now be set for specific time-frames
Support for Internet Explorer
Custom routes can be added to the Sunstone server to ease the integration with third party tools

Migrating from OpenNebula 3.6

OpenNebula 3.8 is API compatible with OpenNebula 3.x, so you should expect that applications and drivers developed for 3.x work with this release.

Also there have been minor changes in the OpenNebula DB schema to accommodate the quota & accounting data. These changes are automatically managed by the migration process, but if you have developed any customization you may need to update it.

A detailed upgrade process can be found in the documentation.

For a complete set of changes to migrate from a 3.x installation please refer to the Compatibility Guide. You should also read this document if you are an OpenNebula 3.x user.

Getting the Software & Documentation

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 3.8 can be found here.

Acknowledgements

The OpenNebula project would like to thank the community members and users who have contributed to this software release by being active with the discussions, answering user questions, or providing patches for bugfixes, features and documentation, and especially to China Mobile, Research in Motion, SZTAKI LPDS, VIVOSS, Jan Benadik (ATOS), Ricardo Duarte, Robert Schweikert (NOVELL), João Pagaime (FCCN), Patrice Lachance (Logica), Jochem Ippers, Matthias Schmitz, Arthur Zalevsky, Rogier Mars (FortyTwo), Christopher Barry (RJmetrics), Shyam Sundar C S, Mario Wu, Laurent Grawet, Matthew Patton (InfoRelay), Emmanuel Mathot (Terradue), Hyun Woo Kim (FermiLab), Steven Timm (Fermilab), Bastien Cadiot, Jan Horacek (Etnetera), Giovanni Toraldo (Liberologico), Cyrille Duverne (euranova.eu), André Monteiro, Valentin Bud, and Karanbir Singh (CentOS). OpenNebula's Development Portal provides more details about the specific contributions. We would also like to thank all the people that have contributed translations for Self-Service and Sunstone.

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.