October 30th, 2009. The OpenNebula team is happy to announce the second beta release of OpenNebula 1.4. This Beta 2 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.
After nearly three months has passed since the feature freeze for OpenNebula 1.4, the OpenNebula team has been working hard on polishing the new features, and solving bugs. While there could be some issues that need to be fixed before the stable release, OpenNebula 1.4 beta 2 shapes up nicely and brings an important number of improvements and innovations in Cloud computing.
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 list of changes and bug fixes included in OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 2, can be found in dev.opennebula.org
General
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
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
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
About OpenNebula