Latest News from Ignacio M. Llorente

Why Use OpenNebula on Your Existing VMware Infrastructure?

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

VMware hypervisors of the ESX family (3.x, 4.x and 5.0) are fully, out-of-the box supported by the latest versions of OpenNebula(3.0+). If you have a server farm based on any of the ESX versions, then you can make use of OpenNebula to better manage your physical (and virtual) resources in order to build a private cloud and provide virtualized environments. OpenNebula is the most powerful open-source alternative to VMware datacenter and cloud suite, delivering enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability with broader platform support and integration capabilities.

C12G Launches Enterprise Edition of OpenNebula 3.4 Cloud Manager

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition ofOpenNebula. OpenNebula 3.4, released one month ago, features enhancements in several cloud subsystems, like support for multiple datastores, resource pools, elastic IPs in the Amazon API, improved web GUIs, and better support for hybrid clouds with Amazon EC2. Some of these improvements were contributed by several members of the OpenNebula community, such as Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University. OpenNebulaPro is used by corporations, research centers and governments looking for a hardened, certified, long-term supported cloud platform. OpenNebulaPro combines the rapid innovation of open-source with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks. Compared to other commercial alternatives, OpenNebulaPro is an adaptable and interoperable cloud management solution that delivers enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability at significantly lower costs.

Advances in Clouds - Research in Future Cloud Computing

Wed, 09 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

It has been more than two years since the European Commission published in January 2010 its pioneering report about the Future of Cloud Computing. A group of experts was established with the aim to evaluate the state-of-the-art and develop future research directions in cloud computing. Since then, there has been considerable advances in the field, developments have closed some gaps that were identified in this report, but more challenges have emerged. We were re-convened by the European Commission in 2011 in order to capture these changes and maintain a state-of-the-art view on cloud computing technologies, its position in and its relevance for Europe. The experts, led by Keith Jeffery, Lutz Schubert and Maria Tsakali, have produced a final version of this report entitled Advances in Clouds - Research in Future Cloud Computing. The report brings valuable information for people defining Cloud Computing strategies, developing innovative research lines, or exploring emerging market opportunities beyond today’s Clouds. It is a must-read.

OpenNebula and OpenStack Featured in European Report Advances in Clouds

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:46:00 EDT

The European Commission has just published a report entitled Advances in Clouds – Research in Future Cloud Computing where a Group of Experts provides a state-of-the-art view on cloud computing technologies, its position in and its relevance for Europe. The Group of Experts was conveyed in 2011 and includes representatives from major Cloud players, like IBM, NEC, Google, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France Telecom, Oracle, British Telecom, or T-Systems. The report brings valuable information for people defining Cloud Computing strategies, developing innovative research lines, or exploring emerging market opportunities beyond today’s Clouds.

Release of OpenNebula 3.4.1

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project has just announced the general availability of OpenNebula 3.4.1. This is a maintenance release that fixes bugs reported by the community and includes new languages for Sunstone and the Self-Service portals. OpenNebula 3.4 (Wild Duck) was released three weeks ago bringing countless valuable contributions by many members of our community, and specially from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University. OpenNebula 3.4 incorporated support for multiple Datastores that provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations, defining different SLA policies and features for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage. Additionally, OpenNebula 3.4 also featured improvements in other areas like support for clusters (resource pools), new tree-like menus for Sunstone, or the addition of the Elastic IP calls in the EC2 Query API.

OpenNebula 3.4 Cloud Platform Is Out

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 3.4 (Wild Duck). OpenNebula 3.4 is the most feature-rich open-source alternative to VMware datacenter and cloud suite, delivering enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability with broader platform support and integration capabilities for KVM, Xen and VMware hypervisors. The software brings countless valuable contributions by many members of our community, and specially from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University. As main new feature, OpenNebula 3.4 incorporates support for multiple Datastores that provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations, defining different SLA policies and features for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage. Additionally, OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other areas like support for clusters (resource pools), new tree-like menus for Sunstone, or the addition of the Elastic IP calls in the EC2 Query API.

OpenNebula 3.4 Beta Cloud Management Toolkit Is Out

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of the beta release of OpenNebula 3.4 (Wild Duck). The software brings valuable contributions by many members of its community, and specially from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University. This release is focused on extending the storage capabilities of OpenNebula, including support for multiple datastores. The use of multiple datastores provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations between storage servers, defining different SLA and QoS policies for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage. OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other systems, especially in the core with the support of logic resource pools, the EC2 API with the support of elastic IPs, the Sunstone and Self-service portals with new cool features, and the EC2 hybrid cloud driver that now supports EC2 features like tags, security groups or VPCs. As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Wild Duck Cluster (also known as Messier 11, or NGC 6705) is an open cluster in the constellation Scutum.

OpenNebula 3.4 Bringing Contributions from RIM, Logica and Terradue

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:00:00 EDT

Ruben S. Montero, Chief Architect of OpenNebula, has published a "sneak peek" of the upcoming version of OpenNebula (3.4 codename Wild Duck), which brings important contributions from the OpenNebula user community, specially from Research in Motion (support for qcow datastores), Logica (extended support for EC2 hybrid set ups) and Terradue 2.0 (VMWare based datastores). This new release is focused on extending the storage capabilities of OpenNebula. Wild Duck will include support for multiple Datastores. A Datastore is any storage medium (typically SAN/NAS servers) used to store disk images for VMs.

OpenNebula Announces New Hyper-V Drivers

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:45:00 EDT

The OpenNebula Project has just announced the release, as a new plugin in the ecosystem, of the OpenNebula 3.2 drivers to build clouds on Microsoft Hyper-V. From the release in October 2011 of a first integration prototype, OpenNebula has worked with some of its users to improve the stability of the integration prototype and to incorporate more functionality. In February 2012, OpenNebula released a development version with enhanced performance and scalability thanks to its integration with technologies commonly available in Windows environments, like Windows Remote Management. This latest release of the Hyper-V drivers for OpenNebula 3.2 additionally brings new features, such us direct connection to Windows Servers nodes without requiring a proxy machine, improvement of CDROM contextualization mechanism, and support for SCSI hard disks.

Roadmap on Infrastructures for e-Science in Europe

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:00:00 EST

The last version of the Roadmap on Distributed Computing Infrastructure for e-Science and Beyond in Europe was released last week by the SIENA initiative. The main open-source cloud computing projects, like OpenNebula, and standards bodies, like DMTF, OASIS, OGF, ETSI, and SNIA, have contributed to this roadmap that assesses the situation, identifies issues, and makes recommendations regarding the adoption and evolution of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructure (e-infrastructure) or to support research in Europe.

As member of its Editorial Board, I recommend to use this roadmap as a reference of the work in cloud standards being developed by the large number of standards bodies and other collaborative groups. I hope this roadmap is a first step to achieve a closer collaboration between them to avoid the existing situation where different working groups are covering the same functionality and needs. As it was pointed out in the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand organized at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly, one of the main barriers to cloud computing adoption is interoperability and portability across cloud providers and products. This is needed to avoid vendor lock-in and create a healthy competitive cloud computing market in Europe.

The roadmap was presented at Cloudscape IV Advances in Interoperability and Cloud Computing Standards, the 23rd of February in Brussels, including presentations from key stakeholders. One very interesting conclusion of the workshop is how open-source is driving forward development and adoption of standards in cloud computing. Most of the initiatives in research infrastructures that were presented during the event are using OpenNebula as vendor-agnostic open platform for building and managing their cloud, and its interfaces are evolving into the standard in this area.

OpenNebula Releases New Enhanced Microsoft Hyper-V Drivers

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

The OpenNebula Project has just announced the release of a new version (3.1.80) of the OpenNebula drivers to build clouds on Microsoft Hyper-V. From its first release in October 2011, OpenNebula has been working with some of its users to improve the stability of the integration prototype and to incorporate more functionality. The main aim of this new release is to enhance the performance and scalability of the drivers and to simplify its deployment by leveraging technologies commonly available in Windows environments, like Windows Remote Management. This release also updates the drivers to work with the latest stable version of OpenNebula (3.2). OpenNebula is planing to deliver a stable version, which will incorporate all the new features, in few weeks. You can find more technical details in the Hyper-V page of the OpenNebula ecosystem.

The New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal in Action

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast demonstrates the new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. The screencast shows how to create a virtual network, how to upload an image, and how to launch virtual machines using them.

C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebula Pro 3.2 Cloud Manager

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of the OpenNebula Toolkit. OpenNebula 3.2, released two weeks ago, brings important benefits to cloud providers with a new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers, and builders with full support for VMware that now includes live migration, advanced contextualization and image management. The new release additionally included important enhancements in networking and security. C12G delivers OpenNebulaPro for business, government, or other organizations looking for a hardened, certified, supported cloud platform. OpenNebulaPro combines the rapid innovation of open-source with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks.

OpenNebula Announces Continuation of Collaboration with Microsoft

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:45:00 EST

The OpenNebula Project has just announced the continuation of its collaboration with Microsoft on innovation and interoperability in cloud computing. The OpenNebula Project and Microsoft started to collaborate in Summer 2011 aimed at adding and mantaining Hyper-V on the list of officially supported hypervisors.

OpenNebula Public Cloud Updated to 3.2

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

The OpenNebula project has just announced that its OpenNebula Cloud has been updated o 3.2 and now offers a virtual computing environment accessible through two different remote cloud interfaces, OCCI and EC2, and two different web interfaces, Sunstone for cloud administrators and the new SelfService for cloud consumers. These mechanisms access the same infrastructure, i.e. resources created by any of the mentioned methods will be instantly available on the others. For instance, you can create a VM with the OCCI interface, monitor it with the EC2 interface, and shut it down using the OpenNebula Sunstone web interface. This Cloud has been migrated to the last OpenNebula version, 3.2. If you have an account you can still use your old username and password. If not, request a new account and check out the new OpenNebula 3.2 features. These interfaces will show you the regular user view of the Cloud, but you will not be able to manage ACLs, hosts, groups nor users, since that will be delegated to the oneadmin group.

Managing Virtual Data Centers

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast, second part of the oZones screencast, shows how to manage and use Virtual Data Centers, both with the oZones CLI and with the oZones web-based interface, to isolate virtual infrastructure environments. It shows how to create a VDC by assigning a group of users to a group of physical resources and by granting one of the users, the VDC administrator, with privileges to manage all virtual resources in the VDC. The users in the VDC, including the VDC administrator, only see the virtual resources and not the underlying physical infrastructure, and can create and manage virtual compute, storage and networking capacity. Enjoy the screencast!

Key Challenges in Cloud Computing to Enable Future Internet of Things

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:55:00 EST

"Key Challenges in Cloud Computing to Enable Future Internet of Things" is the title of the talk about future Internet of Things that I gave today January 19th at The 4th EU-Japan Symposium on New Generation Networks and Future Internet. The talk provides an architectural view of Internet of Things from the perspective of cloud computing, defines its main requirements for the underlying processing infrastructure, and describes the challenges in cloud computing that should be addressed to meet these requirements. The talk concludes with the description of the instruments that should be used to maximize the value of research and to support the collaboration between Japan and the European Union, namely openness, standards, coordination with running initiatives, and code re-use.

OpenNebula 3.2 Cloud Platform Is Out

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of the stable release of OpenNebula 3.2. This release of OpenNebula features important improvements in security, networking and user management, and fully integrates C12G addons, previously only available for OpenNebulaPro customers. As main new features, OpenNebula 3.2 incorporates an easily-customizable self-service portal for end-users that greatly simplifies VM provisioning in the data center. This new update of OpenNebula also brings the highest levels of flexibility, stability, scalability and functionality for VMware-based data centers and clouds in the open-source domain. OpenNebula 3.2 provides an open management platform that compares to vCenter and vCloud, that can moreover be adapted to fit into your environment.

New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal for Cloud Consumers

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

OpenNebula 3.2 will be released in a few days. Along with other major features, it will include a new easy-to-use web-based end-user interface: OpenNebula Self-Service. This new GUI will complement the existing GUIs for the operation of the cloud (OpenNebula Sunstone) and for the management of multiple zones and virtual data centers (OpenNebula Zones). OpenNebula Self-Service is meant to offer a simplified interface to end-users of the OpenNebula cloud. Self-Service works on top of OpenNebula's OCCI server and it allows users to easily create, deploy and manage compute, storage (including upload of images) and network resources in seconds. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. On top of that, OpenNebula Self-Service will come ready to be re-branded, as it is easily customizable (icons, help texts and logos). Last but not least, it will include internationalization support.

Managing Cloud Zones Running in Different Data Centers

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube account. This screencast shows the ability of the oZones component to manage several instances (zones) of OpenNebula, potentially hosted within the same data center to enhance isolation, scalability and performance, or in different data centers to build a geographically distributed multi-site cloud. The oZones server offers a single access point, and centralized management and monitoring, for multiple zones, providing the ability to show their aggregated resources: templates, images, users, virtual machines, virtual networks and hosts. Again, enjoy the screencast!

OpenNebula 2011: A Year of Innovation in Cloud Computing

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:15:00 EST

As 2011 draws to an end, we'd like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2012. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters that we started in June. Most of the time has been spent developing new features to continue to deliver the open-source industry standard for data center virtualization, offering the most feature-rich and flexible solution for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers. The stable version of OpenNebula 2.2 was released in March with the new SunStone GUI and important new features for fault tolerance and scalability. Seven months later, in October, the project released OpenNebula 3.0 with management of zones and virtual data centers, new authentication methods with usage quotas, a VM template repository, a new monitoring and accounting service, and a new network subsystem with support for Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging. OpenNebula 3.0 features the latest innovations in cloud computing for the deployment of cutting-edge enterprise-ready on-premise IaaS clouds.

Industry Recommendations and Consultation Process to the European Cloud Strategy

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:24:00 EST

The European Commission opened a consultation process in May 2011 to collect the opinions of individuals, businesses and public bodies across the continent, prior to the release of a European Cloud Computing Strategy in 2012. The online consultation closed in September, and the Commission has recently made public a report with its main results. Regarding innovation, respondents broadly agreed on the need for future research to improve current cloud computing commercial offerings.

A select industry group has prepared a report with key recommendations to the European Commission on the orientation of a Cloud computing strategy for Europe, proposing some actions for the European Commission and industry. The report presents 10 key recommendations and proposes some actions. They cover legal framework, market and technology related recommendations and actions. Main research and innovation recommendations are to build on the past and foster collaborative research in cloud computing, and to foster interoperability and data portability in the Cloud.

More information about the development of the EU-wide strategy on Cloud Computing is available at the European Commission site.

OpenNebula 3.2 Beta Cloud Management Toolkit Is Out

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:45:00 EST

OpenNebula, the open source cloud project managed by C12G Labs, has announced the availability of the first beta release of OpenNebula 3.2. OpenNebula is the Industry standard for on-premise IaaS cloud computing, offering the most feature-rich, flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid (cloudbursting) clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. This beta release is targeted at testers and users that would like to check the exciting new features that have been developed to meet the needs of our most demanding users.

OpenNebula 3.2 Bringing Full Support for VMware

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:15:00 EST

The OpenNebula Project has just announced that the OpenNebula add-ons will be released under Apache license and incorporated into the main distribution of OpenNebula. The LDAP authentication, the accounting toolset and the VMWare support will be included in subsequent OpenNebula releases without needing to download any additional component. OpenNebula 3.2 support for VMware will also include the following new features that have been developed by C12G Labs for its customers and partners: Support for VMware's vMotion to allow live migration of VMs between VMware hosts, enabling load balancing between cloud worker nodes without downtime in the migrated VM. Support for contextualization to provide a method to pass arbitrary data to a VM, enabling the configuration of the services at boot time. Support for non-cloned, non-persistent disks, enabling the configuration of multiple Windows VMs using the same base non-persistent disk. Support for SSH disk transfers, a replacement for the out-of-the-box shared filesystem Transfer Manager drivers, allowing the copy of the VM disks using the OpenSSH protocol, instead of relying on a shared datastore between the OpenNebula front-end and the VMware hypervisor hosts.

C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebula Pro 3.0

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:30:00 EST

C12G Labs announced today a major new release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of the OpenNebula Toolkit. The third generation of OpenNebula, released two months ago, is helping many organizations make the transition toward the next generation of cloud infrastructures by supporting multiple fully-isolated virtual data centers, advanced multi-tenancy with fine-grained access control, and multiple zones potentially hosted in different geographical locations. This new release has also brought important benefits to cloud users and administrators with a greatly improved SunStone GUI that provides easy access to all the new features in 3.0 and a new oZones GUI to manage zones and virtual data centers. Other features included in this release are new authentication methods with usage quotas, a VM template repository, a new monitoring and accounting service, and a new network subsystem with support for Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging. OpenNebula allows data centers to provide cloud services by leveraging their existing IT assets, instead of building a new system from the ground up, thus protecting existing investments and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Four Years of the OpenNebula Project

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST

Back in November 2007 (four years ago!) we published the first OpenNebula project website (see what it looked like back then, thanks to the Internet Archive), as we geared up for our first release of code (which did not take place until March 2008). The OpenNebula project was created as a way to transfer the main results of our cutting-edge research on efficient management of virtualization in large-scale distributed infrastructures and, since our first software release, OpenNebula has evolved into an active open-source project with a community that, by many measures, is more than doubling each year.

C12G Labs Delivers Accounting and Authentication Addons for OpenNebula 3.0

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EDT

After the release of OpenNebula 3.0 (IRIS), C12G Labs is pleased to announce that a development version of the OpenNebula Addons has been contributed to the OpenNebula Project. The major objective with this release is to provide compatiblity between the Addons and the new OpenNebula 3.0. The contributed components are: LDAP Authentication Module that permits users to have the same credentials as in LDAP, so effectively centralizing authentication. Now tested against OpenNebula 3.0. Accounting Toolset that visualizes and reports resource usage data, and allows their integration with chargeback and billing platforms. Now tested against OpenNebula 3.0. The VMware Driver Addon, which enables the management of an OpenNebula cloud based on VMware ESX and VMware Server hypervisors, has been available since the Beta release of OpenNebula 3.0.

OpenNebula Releases Xen Cloud Platform Integration Prototype

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:45:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project has just announced the release of a development version of the new plug-ins to build clouds based on Xen Cloud Platform. This new prototype, developed by C12G Labs and first result of the collaboration between OpenNebula and Xen announced last week, allows users to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on XCP. The new components, which are available for download as a new OpenNebula ecosystem project, bring the rich capabilities of XenAPI to OpenNebula. XCP provides a complete cloud platform to OpenNebula, with enhanced security, storage and network virtualization. Meanwhile, OpenNebula provides cloud orchestration to XCP with adaptable, extensible, proven, and interoperable data center virtualization management. The OpenNebula project provides support for the deployment and tuning of the new drivers through its ecosystem mailing list.

OpenNebula and Xen Collaborate to Build OpenNebula Clouds on XCP

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EDT

The Xen.org and OpenNebula.org open source communities are working together to add XCP support to OpenNebula. This collaboration will produce the OpenNebula Toolkit for XCP, which will be hosted as freely available open source project on OpenNebula.org. The XCP project team and Xen.org community will provide technical guidance and assistance to the OpenNebula open-source project. “We are really excited to collaborate with Xen.org in offering Xen Cloud Platform support. This will be a huge step forward towards achieving a complete open-source stack for cloud infrastructure deployment. We are planning to have a first prototype of the integration by November.” said Ignacio M. Llorente, Director of OpenNebula Project and Chief Executive Advisor at C12G Labs.

New Canadian Cloud Best Practices Council

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:02:00 EDT

Recently the ‘Canadian Cloud Best Practices Council‘ has been established as an educational forum for Canada's cloud computing thought leaders and consumer advocates. The Council aims to define a strategy for how Canada can become a leader in the emerging field of Cloud Computing, and to accelerate the speed of cloud adoption and utilization in Canada.

Keynote public sector executives including Jirka Danek, CIO at Shared Services Canada and Chris Moore, CIO City of Edmonton, are joining forces with their counterparts from industry powerhouse firms Microsoft, Deloitte, OpenNebula, and others to define an agenda for cloud innovation.

A first annual Cloud Summit is taking place on March 12, 2012 in Edmonton, Alberta. The theme of the conference is “A Call to Arms – Awakening Canada’s Cloud Agenda“. The first edition of the annual conference will discuss how cloud computing technologies can be applied to achieve business transformation while mitigating proprietary barriers to entry.

This is an important step because it will provide the foundation for future business innovation. I am honored to be part of the Advisory Board of the Council and look forward to participating in the Summit, where I will try to present the critical components that, in my view, Government Strategy should incorporate to accelerate adoption of cloud computing, and the importance of open-source and standards for interoperability and innovation.

OpenNebula Cloud Project Releases Microsoft Hyper-V Integration Prototype

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project is happy to announce the release of a development version of the new plug-ins to build clouds on Microsoft Hyper-V. This new prototype, first result of its collaboration in cloud computing innovation and interoperability with Microsoft, allows users to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on a Hyper-V based virtualization platform. The new components are available for download under the Apache license as a new OpenNebula ecosystem project. The OpenNebula project provides support for the deployment and tuning of the new drivers through its ecosystem mailing list. The support for Hyper-V consolidates OpenNebula's position as a fully open-source interoperable and innovative solution for the complete and comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by offering common cloud standards and interfaces, leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting existing investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. In order to provide the greater flexibility, the integration supports both variants of Hyper-V, namely in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Moreover the integration will not require the installation of new services in the cloud nodes, making quite simple and rapid to build an OpenNebula cloud on existing Hyper-V deployments. OpenNebula would like to thank enterprise cloud provider VrStorm for its help in the evaluation of the new plug-ins.

Building a Cloud for High Performance Computing with OpenNebula

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT

OpenNebula is being used by many leading supercomputing (SARA, CESGA, CESCA, PDC-KTH, PIC...) and research centers (ESA, CERN, FermiLab, CSIRO, KIT, Harvard SEAS...) to build HPC and science clouds for hosting virtualized computational environments, such as batch farms and computing clusters, and for providing users with new "HPC as a service" resource provisioning models. One of our recent invited talks in this field, at ISC Cloud Computing 2011, illustrates the benefits of using OpenNebula both as an infrastructure tool, to build private clouds, and as an provisioning tool, to build public clouds. Here we try to summarize the main requirements that we have received from these organizations building clouds for HPC environments, and the functionalities that make OpenNebula unique to fulfill these requirements.

New OpenNebula Screencast Series

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT

The OpenNebula project has started creating a series of screencasts to illustrate the most improtant features of OpenNebula 3.0. A first screencast demonstrates how easy it is to register new Images, create Templates, instantiate Virtual Machines from those Templates and accessing them through the embedded VNC. In addition it provides an overview of Sunstone and its major features: the Dashboard, where you’ll see the current status of your cloud, the detailed information panel for each resource and the real-time update of resources and the Dashboard. Enjoy the screencast!

Government Strategy to Accelerate Adoption of Cloud Computing

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:00:00 EDT

The adoption of cloud computing goes beyond cutting costs or transforming fixed costs into variable costs. Cloud is a powerful innovation and business transformation platform to increase productivity and competitiveness by supporting improved services and new business and service models. However, for its complete adoption by industry, there are three challenges that, according to my experience, should be addressed by a Government Strategic Plan for Cloud Computing. Here we very briefly describe these main challenges and the actions that should be taken to help bridge these gaps.

SARA's OpenNebula HPC Cloud Goes into Production

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:15:00 EDT

Last week the OpenNebula project gave a keynote about HPC Cloud Computing with OpenNebula at the High Performance Cloud Computing Day hosted by the SARA Supercomputing Center and the Big Grid project to officially inaugurate its new HPC Cloud infrastructure. It was really impressive to see the work done by the HPC Cloud team during the last two years. It was 2009 when OpenNebula had the first technical discussions with this team about how to build an IaaS cloud that could address the challenging needs of the HPC community. At that time, they had the vision to understand the full potential of cloud computing for High Performance Computing, and since then they have done pioneering, innovative work that is now helping others to follow the same path. Moreover, from the beginning they involved the users in the testing of the platform to make sure the final infrastructure would fully address their needs.

C12G and Logica Announce a Partnership on OpenNebula Cloud Services

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:15:00 EDT

C12G Labs has announced that it has entered into an agreement with Logica France, a business and technology service company, to offer cloud solutions to clients. Utilising C12G Labs OpenNebulaPro product, Logica completes its cloud computing services with open-source based enterprise grade cloud offerings. OpenNebulaPro is the supported and certified enterprise-grade distribution of the widely used OpenNebula toolkit for cloud computing. OpenNebula is used by thousands of organizations to build large-scale production public and private clouds using KVM, Xen, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, and hybrid clouds using Amazon Web Services. The cloud management tool includes features for integration, management, scalability, security and accounting that many enterprises IT shops need for cloud adoption.

Release of the Third Generation of the OpenNebula Cloud Manager

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:30:18 EDT

OpenNebula 3.0 features the latest innovations in cloud computing for the deployment of cutting-edge enterprise-ready on-premise IaaS clouds The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the third major release of its widely deployed OpenNebula Toolkit, a fully open-source enterprise-grade cloud computing tool for the complete and comprehensive management of clouds and virtualized data centers. OpenNebula 3.0 delivers availability, reliability, scalability, security and efficiency with a focus on allowing data centers to provide cloud services by leveraging their existing IT assets, instead of building a new system from the ground up, thus protecting existing investments and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula Expands Its Virtualization Support

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EDT

OpenNebula is a fully open-source interoperable solution for the management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid clouds. This cloud management tool is used by many research projects as a powerful tool for innovation and interoperability, and by thousands of organizations to build large-scale production clouds using KVM, Xen and VMware. In the last days, the project has announced that new ecosystem components have been contributed to support OpenVZ and VirtualBox, and are being developed to support Hyper-V. The support for all these hypervisor gives customers a great choice of enterprise ready virtualization platforms. OpenNebula platforms is hypervisor agnostic, providing a centralized management for heterogeneous environments with multiple hypervisors and supporting multiple hypervisors within the same physical box. These announcements consolidate OpenNebula's position as a fully open-source interoperable and innovative solution for the management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by offering common cloud standards and interfaces, leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting existing investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Building a Cloud for Mission-Critical Applications with OpenNebula

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:45:00 EDT

OpenNebula 3.0 is bringing many new features to build cutting-edge cloud infrastructures. Most of them have been developed to address the needs of organizations running production environments. This article tries to summarize the main requirements on security, control and availability that we have received from organizations building infrastructures for mission-critical applications or for offering premium cloud services, and the functionality that makes OpenNebula unique to fulfill these requirements. Because our experience is that there is not a single solution for Cloud availability, our position is that the IaaS cloud stack should provide administrators and integrators with configurable failover and redundancy mechanisms at physical host, zone, region and cloud levels to support availability of running applications services and to support the availability of the cloud service itself. So they can define and implement their specific model for availability in the cloud to fulfill the requirements of their target users and market, from a pure "design for failure" approach (commodity cloud), where software and higher level management tools take responsibility for application availability, to a more "traditional" approach (enterprise cloud), where the cloud provides the availability and redundancy necessary to keep it running in case of failure. In the enterprise cloud case, the design and deployment of the infrastructure is much more difficult due to the high number of components and failure scenarios that can arise, and its integration with mission-critical data center platforms and facilities.

OpenNebula and Microsoft Collaborate

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 07:15:00 EDT

OpenNebula has just announced that they are working with Microsoft on cloud computing innovation utilizing the Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor. Microsoft is supporting the creation of OpenNebula clouds on Windows Server Hyper-V. Hyper-V adoption is rising fast and its support to build OpenNebula clouds is highly demanded by their community. The results of this collaboration will be incorporated into the OpenNebula distribution and so available freely to the public. OpenNebula started the work in July and are planning to have a first prototype of the integration in mid October. The new components will be released under the Apache license as a new OpenNebula ecosystem project. In order to provide the greater flexibility, the integration will support both variants of Hyper-V, namely in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Disk images will be managed using a shared storage server (e.g., SAN) and standard POSIX calls from the OpenNebula server. OpenNebula will additionally leverage the networking management functionality provided by Hyper-V. The integration will not require the installation of new services in the nodes, making quite simple and rapid to build an OpenNebula cloud on existing Hyper-V deployments.

Integration of SUSE Studio with OpenNebula

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:59:00 EDT

C12G Labs has just released a new guide on integrating SUSE Studio with OpenNebula. This guide addresses how to create or adapt any SUSE Studio appliance by simply adding a 20-line script to the appliance, which will integrate the appliance’s network with OpenNebula and will handle the contextualization process. It also illustrates further integration steps to handle SUSE Studio url’s directly by OpenNebula. With a few-lines modification to the driver, it can manage the whole download, unpack and register process. Take a look at the SUSE Studio appliance configuration and see it running on top of OpenNebula

New OpenNebula Working Group on Cloud Interoperability and Portability

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

OpenNebula has just announced the creation of a new Working Group on Cloud Interoperability and Portability. The aim of this working group is to discuss open standards and their implementation in projects that make use of OpenNebula clouds. Inter-project collaboration especially in the realm of support for open standards such as Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI), Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), and Open Virtualization Format (OVF), and development of standard APIs with interoperability among different ecosystem modules will be the focus of this working group. OpenNebula has emerged as a viable open source alternative to commercial cloud management solutions. A number of companies are adopting OpenNebula in their IT infrastructure. Not only that, it is also been actively promoted by the European Commission as the basis for numerous cloud computing related research. There is a real need for interaction and exchange of ideas between such projects and the industry partners alike. The OpenNebula Interoperability Working Group has been established to facilitate such an exchange.

Cloud Innovation at Cloud Day 2011

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:22:00 EDT

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to give a keynote about Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing at the first annual Cloud Day in Kista. The annual Cloud Days in Kista featured leading international and Swedish experts from industry and academia, who presented the cutting edge of cloud computing technologies. My presentation focused on how federated and hybrid clouds will play a significant role in IT strategies and e-infrastructures in the coming years, the different hybrid cloud computing scenarios, and the existing challenges for interoperability.

Organized by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing, and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology under the enthusiastic leadership of Ake Edlund and Seif Haridi, the successful event also included keynotes by Michael Franklin (UC Berkeley) and Peter S Magnusson (Google). All the presentations are available for download.

C12G Announces New Pricing Plan for OpenNebula Support Subscriptions

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:05:16 EDT

C12G Labs announced today a new competitive pricing plan for OpenNebulaPro support subscriptions. OpenNebulaPro provides the rapid innovation of open-source, with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks. Compared to other commercial alternatives, OpenNebulaPro is an adaptable and interoperable cloud management solution that delivers enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability at significantly lower costs.

Federating Multiple Cloud Instances with OpenNebula Zones

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:45:00 EDT

This is the second article covering the functionality provided by the new OpenNebula Zones (oZones) component available in the third major release of OpenNebula. In a previous article, we described its Virtual Data Center (VDC) functionality that is helping many IT organizations make the transition toward the next generation of cloud infrastructures supporting multiple fully-isolated VDCs with advanced multi-tenancy. This article elaborates on its support for building multi-tier cloud architectures consisting of multiple OpenNebula Zones.

Managing Virtual Data Centers with OpenNebula Zones

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:00:00 EDT

The recently announced beta release of OpenNebula 3.0 includes a new OpenNebula Zonescomponent that brings support for building multi-tier cloud architectures consisting of multiple OpenNebula instances (zones) and for defining Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) within each zone. In this article we elaborate on the VDC functionality that is helping many IT organizations make the transition toward the next generation of cloud infrastructures running multiple fully-isolated Virtual Data Centers. This article presents an overview of the VDC model, the VDC support available in OpenNebula 3.0, and some examples of deployment scenarios. A Virtual Data Center is a fully-isolated virtual infrastructure environment where a group of users, under the control of the VDC administrator, can create and manage compute, storage and networking capacity. VDCs are a powerful instrument to compartmentalize a cloud infrastructure and to support organizational isolation with advanced multi-tenancy. The cloud administrator creates a VDC by assigning a group of users to a group of physical resources and by granting at least one of the users, the VDC administrator, with privileges to manage all virtual resources in the VDC. The users in the VDC, including the VDC administrator, only see the virtual resources and not the underlying physical infrastructure. The physical resources allocated by the cloud administrator to the VDC can be shared among other VDCs or completely dedicated to the VDC, providing isolation at the physical level too.

OpenNebula 3.0 Cloud Management Toolkit Is Out

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:15:00 EDT

OpenNebula, the open-source cloud project managed by C12G Labs, has announced the availability of the first beta release of OpenNebula 3.0. OpenNebula is the Industry standard for on-premise IaaS cloud computing, offering a comprehensive solution for the management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid (cloudbursting) clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. This beta release is targeted at testers and users that would like to check the exciting new features that have been developed to meet the needs of our most demanding users.

Results of the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT

The European Commission has published the results of the Workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand organized at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly. The aim of the workshop was to identify the main elements of a European cloud strategy and the possible need for public-policy intervention, considering demand and supply side concerns. The results include two reports and one video. One of the reports is the below slide with the summary of the workshop presented in the plenary session. The second report is a more complete description of its purpose, context, discussions, actions and future steps.

The video is a very short interview with me, as speaker at the workshop, describing the challenges identified and the actions to address them.

The following is a transcript of that interview.

Cloud Computing will play a major role in tomorrow’s economy, first as innovation platform to increase productivity and competitiveness, and secondly as a new service industry that will provide many opportunities for European ICT companies. The workshop has helped identify the main areas of a European Cloud Strategy both to boost adoption of cloud computing and to lead cloud computing research and innovation. The workshop consisted of three different panels.

The first panel has identified the different aspects that should be addressed to ensure that Europe can play a leading and active role both in using and in enabling cloud computing
The second panel has explored the different opportunities for innovation and research to help create better clouds and to accelerate its adoption
The third panel has discussed the needs of standards for interoperability, including a legal framework for international data protection and privacy

Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:28:00 EDT

"Challenges in Hybrid and Federated Cloud Computing" is the title of the keynote about the future of cloud computing that I am giving tomorrow July 7th at HPCS2011 and on the 31th of August at ParCo2011. The keynote describes the different cloud federation scenarios, ranging from a federation built on commercial cloud providers that offer no real support for federation to one built on data centers of the same organization where the sites are completely dedicated to supporting all aspects of federation. The level of federation is defined based on the amount of information disclosed and how much control over the resources is provided across sites. The keynote also presents the existing challenges for interoperability in federated and hybrid cloud computing scenarios, and ends with real-life examples of multi-cloud environments running OpenNebula.

Would be great to meet you at these venues!.

View more presentations from Ignacio M. Llorente.

A View of the Challenges, Opportunities and Innovation Potential of Cloud Computing for the European Cloud Strategy

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 02:00:00 EDT

Unleashing the Potential for Innovation of Cloud Computing is the title of the presentation that I will give in the workshop Towards a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe: Matching Supply and Demand at the 1st Digital Agenda Assembly next Friday, June 17th. The aim of the workshop is to help identify the main elements of a European Cloud Strategy. As pointed out by Rainer Zimmermann, DG INFSO, Head of unit: Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures, The impact of cloud technologies goes beyond reducing IT costs and improving business efficiency. Companies of all sizes and government institutions will achieve new levels of productivity and innovation.

In the presentation, which is available online at the workshop site, I introduce the key challenges and gaps to be addressed in order to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing and so to unleash its full potential for innovation, contributing to increase the competitiveness and productivity of the European economy. For each gap I briefly describe the issues that, in my view, European Commission funding should address to help bridge such gap. The presentation mostly focuses on the technology challenges by elaborating on the open research issues on cloud computing that should be addressed to create better clouds, the importance on innovation-focused research to be cloud-active, and the opportunities for the ICT industry in this new service industry. OpenNebula is also described as European success story in cloud computing research and innovation. Finally open-source is presented as a model for innovation and as a vehicle to bring open interoperable cloud computing to the European industry.

Europe should play a leading role not only in using cloud computing and leveraging its full potential to foster innovation, but also in proving the enabling components to build better cloud solutions. I am firmly convinced that both represent the main opportunities for the European ICT industry.

Hope to see you there!.