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:

• Virtual Machine Rescheduling, when the rescheduling flag is set, the scheduler will migrate (or livemigrate) it to another host. Now you can easily empty a host to perform maintenance operations (onehost flush).
• Virtual Machine Reset, hard reboot for non-responsive VMs.
• Volume hotplug, you can now easily hot plug volumes to a running VM. The volumes can be either a volatile disk created on-the-fly on the target host where the VM is running, or an existing image from a Datastore.
• Accounting re-design, all the accounting data has been integrated with OpenNebula database and authN & authZ system. Management of the accounting process is now completely handled by OpenNebula core, improving its efficiency.
• New Quota system, the quota system has been rewritten from scratch. Now it uses the OpenNebula database and it is fully integrated in the OpenNebula core. It also features new quotas for storage and networking.
• Cluster-wise System Datastore, different system datastores can now be defined for different clusters. This allows a better planning and scalability of cluster storage.
• LVM drivers, an adapted version to work with the datastore system has been included in OpenNebula 3.6.
• Clone disk images, to easily get a copy of an existing disk. The clone operation is performed by interacting with the target datastore, so invoking a specialized clone action.
• Duplicate VM templates, to easily create a new VM definition by starting from a working template.
• Performance improvements in Authorization, the authorization process has been improved, so no external process is invoked when no specific auth driver is configured. Now that quotas are integrated in the core, this will be the most likely configuration.
• Multiple servers for LDAP driver, now OpenNebula can handle multiple LDAP servers when authenticating a user, easing the deployment of multi-site clouds.
• Generic Document DB, this is a feature target to OpenNebula developers. The generic storage document model allows component developers to store the state of their applications within the OpenNebula database, leveraging the OpenNebula facilities like AuthZ & AuthN systems or existing users and groups.

OpenNebula is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace:

• Sunstone Integration: Sunstone includes a new tab that allows OpenNebula users to interact with the OpenNebula Marketplace.
• CLI Integration: There is a new command, onemarket, to easily interact with the Marketplace.

There are several new features in the GUI applications:

• Collaborative Translations: Sunstone & Self-service include support for several languages, we have set up a project at transifex.net to ease the addition of new languages.
• Re-design, a new dashboard for the main application and for the cluster view.
• Support for OpenNebula new features, to include support for hot-pluging, image cloning, and quotas.

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.