On July 26, OpenNebula project announced the availability of OpenNebula 4.2, Flame.
The OpenNebula project provides a management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms. OpenNebula 4.2 added a better Sunstone interface, the VMware backend has been redesigned and it is now possible to monitore datastore capacity. Furthermore the Xen backend has been upgraded to support the new interfaces introduced in Xen 4.0 and OneFlow, the multi-tier application manager, it is included and fully integrated in the distribution.Some highlights of the new release includes:
OpenNebula Core:
- Datastore Monitoring: the capacity of the datastores is now monitored by the drivers. This will help users and admins to quickly identify the resource usage of the cloud. Admins can also set security threshold in capacity usage.
- New Hooks: it is possible to program hooks on any transition. Also the information of the previous state can be passed as a hook argument to customized the action depending on the original VM state
OpenNebula Drivers:
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VMware, the whole set of VMware drivers, storage, networking and virtualization has been improved. The networking drivers have been also streamlined. Monitoring of ESXi hosts is now complete and the functionality of the virtualization drivers is now levelled with KVM and Xen. In the process the runtime dependencies of VMware has been reduced by accessing the native VMware VI API.
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Xen, support for the Xen4 interfaces through the xl command. Xen3 is totally supported with its own set of drivers.
OpenNebula Gate:
OpenNebula Gate (onegate) is the VM gate to OpenNebula.
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With a security token the VMs can call back home and report guest and/or application status in a simple way, that can be easily queried through OpenNebula interfaces (Sunstone, CLI or API).
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OpenNebula Gate metrics can be also used in conjuntion with OneFlow to develop advanced auto-scaling policies.
Sunstone:
Sunstone has been polished since its redesign in 4.0:
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Improved VNC, it is now possible to detach VNC sessions from the Sunstone tab.
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VM definition update, the template dialog is also used to update VM definitions without the need to go to the text based view.
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Performance improvements, internal improvements in the information management and resource access.
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Self-service view, a “cloudy” provisioning scheme for users.
OpenNebula Flow:
OneFlow allows users and administrators to define, execute and manage multi-tiered applications, or services composed of interconnected Virtual Machines with deployment dependencies between them.
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Auto-scaling policies: A service is composed by roles, each one corresponding to one VM template and each one with certain cardinality, ie, the number of instances of the same VM template.
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Service management improved with the ability to recover from fault situations, the ability to apply operations to all the VMs belonging to certain role, the ability to define a cooldown period after a scaling, etc
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Apply scheduling actions to the VMs that conforms a role.
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Updated sunstone interface
A curious note about the name, OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula, in this case the Flame Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion and it is located about 900 to 1,500 light-years away from Earth.