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OpenNebula 1.2 for Data Center Virtualization & Private Cloud Computing

New Release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine
By Ignacio M. Llorente
Article Rating:
February 9, 2009 09:45 AM EST
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 2,370

We have just announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.2, the second stable release of the project. This is an important milestone for the project and marks that most of the components of OpenNebula are now in place. See this post with the details of the first release.

What is OpenNebula?
The OpenNebula virtual infrastructure engine provides efficient, dynamic and scalable management of groups of interconnected VMs within datacenters involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. OpenNebula supports Xen and KVM platforms and can interface with remote cloud sites, being the only tool able to access on-demand to Amazon EC2 to dynamically scale the local infrastructure based on actual usage. OpenNebula also exhibits an open and flexible architecture which allows the definition of new algorithms for virtual machine placement, and its integration with any virtualization platform, infrastructure cloud offering and third-party component in the cloud ecosystem, such as cloud-like remote interfaces, virtual image managers, and service managers. OpenNebula is one of the components being enhanced in the context of the European Union’s Reservoir Project, which aims to develop the open source technology to enable deployment and management of complex IT services across different administrative domains.

New Features and Highlights in OpenNebula 1.2
OpenNebula 1.2 presents important improvements in the following areas:

  • Image Management. OpenNebula 1.2 features a general mechanism to transfer and clone VM images.
  • Networking.The new Virtual Network Manager module allows you to define virtual networks and it leases IP-MAC pairs to VMs, so you do not have to keep track of the addresses in use. Additionally, the leases are built in such a way that you can easily obtain the IP form the MAC when booting the VM.
  • Robustness and scalability, OpenNebula 1.2 has been tested in the management of hundreds of running VMs to ensure that the code meets production level requirements.

Getting OpenNebula 1.2

The complete source tree for OpenNebula can be freely downloaded. Additionally the ubuntu virtualization team have kindly provided binary packages for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

More Information
Relevant links are:

The OpenNebula team would like to thank everyone that sent comments, reported bugs and provide patches. It definitely helped to get a better OpenNebula 1.2. Specially, we would like to thank the great labour done by Soren Hansen, reflected in submitted patches that helped to get OpenNebula closer to work with Ubuntu and Debian. 

Published February 9, 2009 – Reads 2,370
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More Stories By Ignacio M. Llorente

Ignacio M. Llorente, Ph.D in Computer Science and Executive MBA, is a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology, and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid. He has held several appointments as an independent expert for the European Commission (Information Society and Media Directorate-General); visiting positions at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA); consultancy positions with Sun Microsystems; and a Senior Researcher position in the Advanced Computing Lab at CAB (associated to NASA Astrobiology Institute). He has 17 years of experience in research and development of advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms, and management of international projects and initiatives on Grid and Cloud computing; having led the research group in 15 sponsored projects; and having published more than 130 scientific papers in the leading journals and proceedings books. He is currently co-leading the research and development of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine, the Globus GridWay Metascheduler, and the Grid4Utility initiative for federation of Grids. He participates in the EGEE and BEinGRID European projects, as UCM partner responsible, and in the Globus Alliance, as chair of one of its projects; and coordinates the Activity on Management of Virtual Execution Environments in the RESERVOIR Project, main EU-funded research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. He is the Grid Community Liaison Coordinator for the Service Oriented Infrastructure Working Group of NESSI; and co-chairs the OGF Working Group on Open Cloud Computing Interface. He coordinates the Middleware Activity in the Spanish Initiative in e-Science and the Working Group on Service Oriented Infrastructures and Grids of INES.