The OpenNebula team has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 Beta Hourglass (1.3.80).This is the first preview of next stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager. The new OpenNebula version incorporates bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing. OpenNebula 1.4 aims to be the swiss-army knife of Cloud Computing, being an open and flexible tool that fits into existing data center environments to build any type of Cloud deployment. OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster, which is usually referred as Private Cloud. OpenNebula supports Hybrid Cloud to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports Public Clouds by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.

Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are:

  • EC2 Query API interface on top of OpenNebula, so you can transform your OpenNebula installation into a Public Cloud
  • A new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) to easily develop any Cloud interface or Cloud application (several Cloud interfaces, such a OGF OCCI-API, are planned)
  • Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
  • Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
  • Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
  • Libvirt interface has been moved to the libvirt repository
  • New ElasticHosts drivers and support for multiple Amazon EC2 Clouds in Hybrid Cloud deployments
  • Easy integration within your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
  • Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
  • A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples

Relevant References: