News

The OpenNebula team has released the first beta version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0 next September.

OpenNebula 2.0 Beta 1 includes a significant amount of changes and new features in many areas, bringing the most flexible, scalable and feature rich Cloud Toolkit to the Free Software community. OpenNebula 2.0 is the result of a close collaboration with our user community to address their scalability, flexibility and security requirements in large-scale production systems.

What is new in OpenNebula 2.0 Beta1

Image Repository. The Image Repository allows users to easily specify disk images from a catalog without worrying about low-level disk configuration attributes or block device mapping. Also, image access control is applied to the images registered in the repository, hence simplifying multi-user environments and image sharing. The traditional method of specifying VM disks is also fully supported.

MySQL support. OpenNebula can work now with MySQL or Sqlite DBs backends. The new MySQL support brings important performance and scalability improvements compared to the Sqlite implementation. MySQL is the recommended option for large-scale clouds.

Scalability Improvements. Several components of OpenNebula have been tuned to work with tens of thousands of VMs, including the redesign of the scheduler and adjustments to the monitoring modules.
Cluster support. Physical hosts can now be grouped in logical clusters, so after a cluster is defined it can be then used to set the placement of a VM.

Authorization & Authentication Drivers. The authorization and authentication processes in OpenNebula have been totally redesigned. Now they can be handled natively by the OpenNebula core, offering the same functionality as OpenNebula 1.4. Alternatively, the A&A processes can be handled by an external component that can be integrated with any A&A system or user maps (e.g. LDAP, Kerberos…). As an example OpenNebula 2.0 features a quota based authorization module and user authentication based on RSA keys.

Virtual Networking Improvements. OpenNebula 2.0 lets you define generic attributes associated to a a Virtual Network (e.g. gateway, dns servers…) that can then be included in the context of a VM. This will let you easily configure VMs with multiple NICs. Additionally Virtual Networks can now be defined as public, and thus shared among multiple users.

Improved EC2 support. The EC2 Query server can now be used with the EC2 ecosystem, supported third party applications include ElasticFox or EucaTools.

Java Bindings for the OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) OpenNebula 2.0 includes JAVA bindings that wraps the XML-RPC interface methods exposed by the core.

Novell today released SUSE Gallery, a new online showcase for registered SUSE Studio users to publish their appliances and cloud-based applications.

With SUSE Gallery, end users can browse published appliances for the solution to their particular commercial or personal need, and then download the appliance free of charge.

With an appliance, the end user avoids the typical installation and configuration headaches that come with many traditional software applications. For independent software vendors (ISVs) and other software developers, SUSE Gallery represents an opportunity to broaden the exposure of their application and reach an entirely new audience.

SUSE Gallery is the latest addition to the SUSE Appliance Program, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary today.

The SUSE Appliance Program is a business and technology program that helps ISVs simplify appliance creation, reduce development and support costs, and extend applications to the cloud. A key technology component of the SUSE Appliance Program is SUSE Studio, the industry’s most successful web-based appliance creation tool with more than 82,000 registered users worldwide.

The Program also includes the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, which enables ISVs and enterprises to build, manage and update appliances regardless of location.

SUSE Gallery offers a free, web-based venue for ISVs and other users to publish and market their appliances.  ISVs, corporate developers and enthusiasts can now share, promote, collaborate and freely exchange their appliances with others.  Novell will not charge developers for putting their appliances in SUSE Gallery, nor will Novell charge end users for downloading appliances.  SUSE Gallery provides a friction-free venue for the exchange of ideas, innovation and best practices across all sectors of the software industry.

Serving as a central repository of appliances, SUSE Gallery targets developers and other users searching for commercial and community-oriented appliances. Appliance templates and tailored operating system images can also be published, facilitating reuse that further accelerates appliance development. Each published appliance will have a dedicated web page with a unique URL, making it possible for software vendors to conduct targeted marketing and sales campaigns and track results.

SUSE Gallery is available now at www.susegallery.com or in the browse feature of SUSE Studio Online.

VKernel, provider of Capacity Management products for virtualized datacenters, today announced the release of VKernel Chargeback 2.0.

The new release extends chargeback support to both Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and VMware ESX environments while also adding support for mixed chargeback models.

Adoption of Microsoft virtualization continues to grow with some analyst firms estimating 20% or greater market share for Microsoft Hyper-V server.

The growth of Microsoft Hyper-V Server comes at a time when enterprise customers are adopting multiple virtualization platforms and are using these virtualization platforms as the foundation of private cloud architectures. These mixed environments require capacity management solutions that operate across both platforms.

In addition to new heterogeneous capabilities, VKernel Chargeback 2.0 now supports both allocated and actual resource consumption models.

By reporting on both measures, infrastructure teams can chargeback for actual resource consumption, allocated resources, or simply show application teams the difference in real dollars between their allocated capacity and actual usage. This cost visibility is critical to capacity management, reducing VM sprawl, and supporting private cloud initiatives.

A thirty-day trial of Chargeback 2.0 is available for immediate download from http://www.vkernel.com/download/chargeback.

LinMin, maker of  IT automation software LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning, today unveiled LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning Release 6.0 with Cloud, hosting and corporate data center enhancements.

Today’s release, which has been in development for nearly a year, also offers improvements in security, platform support and ease of integration with IT applications, including control panels and Cloud orchestrators.

LinMin now also offers more streamlined application integration. Release 6.0 boasts an upgraded API, including a new disk imaging interface, enhanced provisioning support, and token and IP-based authentication.

LinMin’s API enables Cloud, hosting and corporate data centers to seamlessly add provisioning and imaging support to their existing IT applications, enabling full server provisioning, recovery and cloning automation of the data center.

The API also enables Independent Software Vendors and OEMs to augment their offerings with sophisticated provisioning and imaging capabilities.The new release offers several key new features. The optional Windows Provisioning Module enables the deployment of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 systems using the same graphical or programmatic interfaces used to provision all current releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and SLES as well as legacy Windows operating systems.

Ultimately, LinMin helps create flexibility within the data center. By enabling system administrators to automate server provisioning, scalability is enhanced without increasing cost.

Disaster Recovery is also substantially streamlined with LinMin’s snapshot rollback capability. By offering both a browser-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) and an Application Programming Interface (API) so customers can integrate their control panels, cloud orchestrators and other automation tools, LinMin makes server provisioning, rollback and cloning easy.

LinMin is also used to automate PC deployments by remotely installing Windows 7, Windows XP and Linux. PCs can also be backed up and restored, avoiding lengthy OS and application installations should PCs get infected with malware.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 6.0 for Linux and Windows is available for free trial. Perpetual license pricing starts at $1,199 for up to 100 systems to provision and image (for major versions of Linux and Windows Server 2003/XP) or $1,799 (for major versions of Linux, legacy Windows plus Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7).