OpenNebula Eagle (4.0)
May 8th, 2013. The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the immediate availability of OpenNebula 4.0 Eagle. The project has come a long way since the first "technology preview" of OpenNebula five years ago. During these years we've witnessed the rise and hype of the Cloud, the birth and decline of several virtualization technologies, but specially the encouraging and exciting growth of OpenNebula; both as a technology and as an active and engaged community.
OpenNebula 4.0 is the result of the terrific feedback of the day-to-day operation of virtualized infrastructures by many of you, result of all your contributions, bug reports, patches, and translations, but one and foremost, OpenNebula 4.0 is the realization of a vision of simplicity, openness, code-correctness and a sysadmin-centric approach. This defines our personality as a community, it defines the OpenNebula Way. Now the features that you've been waiting for….
OpenNebula 4.0 includes new features in most of its subsystems. We are showing for the first time a completely redesigned Sunstone, with a fresh and modern look and an updated workflow for most of the dialogs. The also new Sunstone Views functionality allows to customize the GUI for each type of user or group, so the interface implements a different provisioning model for each role. A whole new set of operations for VMs like system and disk snapshoting, capacity re-sizing, programmable VM actions and IPv6 among others. There are some new drivers also, like Ceph; as well as improvements for VMware, KVM and Xen. The scheduler has received some attention from the OpenNebula team to easily define more placement policies… and much more (see below).
This is a stable release and so a recommended update that incorporates several bug fixes since 4.0 Beta and 4.0 RC. Although this is a major release we've done our best to keep compatibility with OpenNebula 3.8 so any application developed for previous versions should work without effort. We have changed the name of some of the operations over the VM (we have now 32 different management actions) so be sure to check the compatibility and upgrade guides.
Each OpenNebula Series is maintained for three years, in few days we will release the first Service Pack for the OpenNebula 3 Series.
As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745-46. It is located about 7,000 light-years away from Earth.
In the following list you can check the highlights of 4.0 organized by component (a detailed list of changes can be found here):
OpenNebula 4.0 brings multiple new features to manage virtual machines:
There has been also several improvements for administrators and new features to enhance the robustness and scalability of OpenNebula core:
The UI interface has been redesigned with a fresher and modern look. You can see it in action in these screencasts, or check this screen-shot:
This is a new feature that allows you to customize the UI for different users or user groups, so the interface implements the provisioning model for each role. Sunstone views replaces the 3.x self-service portal. Sunstone views does not require any additional service (apart from the sunstone server). Sunstone ships with two predefined views admin and user, we may add a couple of more pre-defined views for the final release.
The back-end of OpenNebula has been also improved in several areas, as described below:
Although OpenNebula 4.0 is a major release, we have kept compatibility at the API level. Legacy method names can be used at the XML-RPC and Ruby and JAVA bindings (it'd be a good idea to start using the new ones, though).
There have been minor changes in the OpenNebula DB schema to solve bug related with large deployments, snapshots & generic 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.
In few days we will release the first Service Pack of the OpenNebula 3 Series. After its first year, and for two additional years, the Project distributes a Service Pack (SP) for each major release that combines all the patches to easily install or deploy its last update. There may be up to three maintenance releases every year for each Service Pack. C12G Labs is committed to supporting all users that install latest Services Packs.
In few days OpenNebulaApps 4.0 will be also available for download including AppStage, AppFlow and AppMarket for your OpenNebula 4.0 cloud, please stay tuned!. These tools will be incorporated into the main distribution of OpenNebula from version 4.2.
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 4.0 can be found here.
Because OpenNebula is inherently portable to different operating systems and virtualization platforms, most Linux distributions and Hypervisors are supported. However, not all platform configurations and combinations exhibit a similar functionality, performance and stability. You can contact us if you need advise about the best platform configurations and environments for functionality and performance. Please read our Certification Policy for more information.
This is the list of the individual platform components that have been through the complete OpenNebula Quality Assurance and Certification Process.
Certified Platform Component | Version |
RedHat Enterprise Linux | 6.4 |
Ubuntu Server | 12.10 |
SUSE Linux Enterprise | 12.3 |
CentOS | 6.4 |
openSUSE | 12.3 |
Debian | 6.0.7 |
VMware | ESX 5.0 |
Xen | 4.0 |
KVM | Supported version that is included in the kernel for the Linux distribution |
Xen Server, Xen Cloud Platform, and Hyper-V | Please contact us if you are interested in these hypervisors |
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 and especially to Produban - Banco Santander, China Mobile, Blackberry, GlobalRap, RedIris, Schneider Electric - Telvent, Qingye Jiang (Eucalyptus), Iftikhar Rathore (CISCO), Joel Merrick (BBC), Bill Campbell (Axcess Finantial), Patrick McGarry (Ceph), and Karanbir Singh (CentOS), Hyun Woo Kim (FermiLab), Márk Gergely, Mihály Héder and Tamás Marlok (MTA SZTAKI), Simon Boulet, Vlastimil Holer, Jon A., Jean-Philippe Garcia Ballester, Matthew Richardson and Dmitri Chebotarov. 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 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.