OpenNebula 3.6 (Lagoon)
July 10th, 2012. The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the availability of OpenNebula 3.6 (Lagoon). This release is focused on stabilizing the features introduced in OpenNebula 3.4, improving the performance of some existing features, and adding new features for virtualization management and integration with the new OpenNebula Marketplace.
OpenNebula 3.6 features a new hotplug mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. Also for OpenNebula 3.6 we have re-written from scratch the Quota and Accounting tools, so now they are included in the OpenNebula core to enhance their integration with the existing AuthZ & AuthN mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone). There are some other new features like VM rescheduling, hard reboots, cloning of disk images, support for per-cluster definition of system datastores…
OpenNebula 3.6 also features improvements in other systems, especially in Sunstone's interface with the redesign of several tabs as well as in the OpenNebula Zones where we got rid of the datamapper dependency to ease the packaging of OpenNebula.
Last but not least, OpenNebula 3.6 is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the SunStone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI. The OpenNebula Marketplace is also of the interest of any software developer to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.
This is a final release and it is aimed at production environments, any infrastructure running a previous version is recommended to upgrade.
As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Lagoon Nebula (also known as M8, or NGC 6523) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius.
In the following list you can check the highlights of 3.6 organized by component (a detailed list of changes can be found here):
This release includes the following changes in OpenNebula core:
OpenNebula is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace:
There are several new features in the GUI applications:
The OpenNebula Zone server includes some minor bug fixes as well as the migration of its persistency libraries to sequel. This change greatly improves the installation and packaging of the component.
OpenNebula 3.6 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.
There are two new datastore operations, stat (to compute the size of an image prior to its creations) and clone (to copy an existing image). OpenNebula includes suitable defaults for all the supported datastores, just check them if you have tune the datastore drivers for your installation.
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.
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 3.6 can be found here, and the PDF's here.
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 Chris Johnson (RIM) for the new functionality for VM re-scehduling, Nicolas Agius (LPS IT) for the new LVM drivers, SZTAKI LPDS for the enhancements in the full iSCSI support, Francesco Camisa (Policlinico San Marco) for the iSCSI datastore with Dell Equallogic arrays, Olivier Sallou (IRISA), Shankhadeep Shome, Rolandas Naujikas (MIF-Vilnius University) and Anil Kumar (Cloud-b-lab) for their so active contribution to documentation, testing and fixing, Michael Kutzner (VIRTION) for the upgrade process from 3.2 to 3.4 with active VMs, and Robert Schweikert (NOVELL) for the new init scripts for openSUSE.
We would also like to thank all the people that have contributed translations for Self-Service and Sunstone.
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.