{"id":656721,"date":"2013-05-08T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-05-08T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=643336"},"modified":"2013-05-08T11:00:13","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T15:00:13","slug":"opennebula-4-0-guns-for-the-vcloud-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/656721","title":{"rendered":"OpenNebula 4.0 guns for the vCloud crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenNebula, the increasingly enterprise-focused<\/a> open-source cloud stack, has hit its fourth major release. Sponsor company C12G has also announced the first OpenNebula conference, which will take place in Berlin in September, a week after GigaOM\u2019s own Structure:Europe<\/a> shindig in London.<\/p>\n

OpenNebula 4.0, codenamed Eagle, is important for several reasons. Firstly, it includes a complete redesign of the Sunstone cloud management interface and a bunch of new operations for managing virtual machines, such as system and disk snapshotting, capacity resizing and IPv6 support. Ceph<\/a> is now supported, too.<\/p>\n

Drop-in vCloud replacement<\/h2>\n

Perhaps most important, though, is OpenNebula 4.0\u2032s enhanced support for VMware users. It\u2019s more a case of testing and certification than new functionality as such, but, as OpenNebula Project director Ignacio Llorente told me, \u201cnow OpenNebula fits perfectly on a VMware-based data center:\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cA thorough plan was carried out to make life \u2018easier\u2019 to VMware technology savvy administrators at the time of using OpenNebula. The workflow of the day-to-day routine tasks that cloud administrators were supposed to undergo was revisited, and the common actions were polished to conform with the philosophy of VMware based infrastructures. One example: the ability to upload VMware disks using the Sunstone Web UI was tested, slightly changed and properly documented.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoreover, the documentation of VMware underwent an exhaustive revamp, to comply with VMware terminology and to close the gap between the two technologies. The most noticeable outcome of this is the storage model of an OpenNebula cloud based on VMware hypervisors. This storage model resembles that of the infrastructures using pure VMware tech. VMware administrators would appreciate the description in the documentation of the VMFS and NFS Datastores, which leverages the use of the Disk\/LUN and Network File System storage types respectively in VMware.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thing is, while OpenNebula has traditionally been seen as a European, more mature counterpart to the AWS-aping likes of OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, these days it\u2019s pitching itself more to enterprise users as an open-source alternative to vCloud that comes with lower costs and support for multiple hypervisors. Llorente said that, while most of the OpenNebula community<\/em> is using KVM or Xen (drivers for which are also improved in the new version, incidentally), 70 percent of customers<\/em> are using OpenNebula on VMware.<\/p>\n

According to Llorente, this means the OpenNebula and OpenStack\/CloudStack cloud models can happily coexist \u2013 and for evidence of this, he points to the fact that OpenStacker Dell is a happy OpenNebula customer<\/a>, as is CloudStack backer Citrix. Other customers, by the way, range from CERN, Fermilab, the European Space Agency and NASA to BlackBerry, China Mobile, Telefonica and Akamai.<\/p>\n

First OpenNebula Global Conference<\/h2>\n

The first OpenNebula Global Conference will take place in Berlin from September 24th through the 26th, the project announced in a blog post<\/a> yesterday. According to Llorente, the aim is to \u201chave a more technical conference\u201d than the more vendor-ish OpenStack Summit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to have a meeting point where the community users and developers, also partners and customers, can discuss issues about their deployments and the future roadmap,\u201d he said. \u201cChina Mobile and BlackBerry have developed enhancements, so we would like to show them. It\u2019s more a community event than a commercial event\u2026 we would prefer technical proposals to commercial proposals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking of the community, Llorente added that the main focus for OpenNebula 4.2 would be the incorporation of the recently open-sourced OpenNebulaApps<\/a> with enhancements such as automatic elasticity. These improvements are being funded by OpenNebula customers through the Fund a Feature<\/a> program that kicked off in February, he said.<\/p>\n

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