What Is OpenNebula ? It is cloud management solution – industry standard open source cloud computing tool to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of distributed data center infrastructures.

OpenNebula is a fully open-source management toolkit for on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing. 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.

OpenNebula can be primarily used as a virtualization tool to manage your virtual infrastructure in the data-center or cluster.

OpenNebula is 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.

Functionality and Capabilities

How are networks managed by OpenNebula?
OpenNebula contains a built-in Virtual Network Manager that enables the mapping of virtual networks onto physical ones. In this way, physical networks can be breakdown into smaller networks that, in turn, can be used to isolate virtual machines in different virtual networks and to communicate those machines in the same isolated virtual networks.

Which VM managers can OpenNebula use?
Physical cluster nodes can have KVM, Xen, or VMware hypervisors installed.

What interfaces does OpenNebula provide?
Native API of OpenNebula is offered via XML-RPC and its Java and Ruby OCA bindings. Managing of virtual machines, physical cluster nodes and virtual networks can be accomplished using this interface. OpenNebula implements the EC2 Query, OGF OCCI and vCloud APIs to demonstrate its support for the development of new Cloud interfaces.

What does OpenNebula offer?
OpenNebula provides a powerful, scalable and secure multi-tenant cloud platform for fast delivery and elasticity of virtual resources.

• The Image Repository system allows to set up and share images, which can be operative systems or data, to be used in Virtual Machines easily.
• The Template Repository system allows to register Virtual Machine definitions in the system, to be instantiated later as Virtual Machine instances.
• Virtual Networking is provided to interconnect Virtual Machines, they can be defined as fixed or ranged networks.
• Once a Template is instantiated to a Virtual Machine, there are a number of operations that can be performed to control their lifecycle, such as migration (live and cold), stop, resume, cancel, etc. These operations are available both from theCLI and the Sunstone GUI.

What are the Main Components?
Interfaces & APIs: OpenNebula provides many different interfaces that can be used to interact with the functionality offered to manage physical and virtual resources. There are two main ways to interface OpenNebula: command line interface and the Sunstone GUI. There are also several cloud interfaces that can be used to create public clouds: OCCIandEC2 Query.

Users and Groups: OpenNebula supports user accounts and groups, as well as variousauthentication and authorization mechanisms. This feature can be used to create isolated compartments within the same cloud, implementing multi-tenancy. Moreover, a powerfulAccess Control Listmechanism is in place to allow different role management, allowing a fine grain permission granting.

Networking: An easily adaptable and customizable network subsystem is present in OpenNebula in order to better integrate with the specific network requirements of existing datacenters. Support for VLANs and Open vSwitch are also featured.

Hosts and Virtualization: Various hypervisors are supported in the virtualization manager, with the ability to control the lifecycle of Virtual Machines, as well as monitor them. This monitorization also applies to the physical hosts.

Advanced Setups
OpenNebula supports the following types of cloud deployments:

• Multiple zones a VDCs: The OpenNebula Zones component (oZones) allows for the centralized management of multiple instances of OpenNebula, called Zones, managing in turn potentially different administrative domains. This zones can be further compartmentalized by grouping physical hosts in Virtual Data Centers (VDCs).

• Hybrid: OpenNebula gives support to build a Hybrid Cloud is an extension of a Private Cloud to combine local resources with resources from remote Cloud providers. A whole Public Cloud provider can be encapsulated as a local resource to be able to use extra computational capacity to satisfy peak demands.

• OpenNebula – the Open Source Management Platform for Enterprise Clouds
• C12G Labs Releases OpenNebula 4.0 Cloud Management Platform