About

Aim

OpenNebula transforms your data center or cluster into a flexible and agile virtual infrastructure which dynamically adapts to the changing demands of the service workload. OpenNebula leverages underlying virtualization, network and storage platforms to create a new virtualization layer between the services and the physical infrastructure. This new layer supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources, so extending the benefits of VM managers from a single physical resource to a distributed infrastructure within and across sites.

OpenNebula is a Virtual Infrastructure Manager that orchestrates storage, network and virtualization technologies to enable the dynamic placement of multi-tier services (groups of interconnected virtual machines) on distributed infrastructures, combining both data center resources and remote cloud resources, according to allocation policies. OpenNebula provides internal and Cloud administration and user interfaces for the full management of the Cloud platform.

Benefits

For the Infrastructure Manager

Faster respond to infrastructure needs for services with dynamic resizing of the physical infrastructure by adding new hosts, and dynamic cluster partitioning to meet capacity requirements of services
Centralized management of all the virtual and physical distributed infrastructure
Higher utilization of existing resources with the creation of a infrastructure incorporating the heterogeneous resources in the data center, and infrastructure sharing between different departments managing their own production clusters, so removing application silos
Operational saving with server consolidation to a reduced number of physical systems, so reducing space, administration effort, power and cooling requirements
Lower infrastructure expenses with the combination of local and remote Cloud resources, so eliminating the over-purchase of systems to meet peaks demands

For the Infrastructure User

Faster delivery and scalability of services to meet dynamic demands of service end-users
Support for heterogeneous execution environments with multiple, even conflicting, software requirements on the same shared infrastructure
Full control of the lifecycle of virtualized services management

For System Integrators

Fits into any existing data center thanks to its open, flexible and extensible interfaces, architecture and components
Builds any type of Cloud deployment
Open source software, Apache license
Seamless integration with any product and service in the virtualization/cloud ecosystem and management tool in the data center, such as cloud providers, VM managers, virtual image managers, service managers, management tools, schedulers…

Features

The last version (v1.4) provides the following features and capabilities:

Virtual Infrastructure Management

Capabilities for the management of the private data center or cluster (Private Cloud Computing)

Feature	Function
Internal Interfaces for Administrators and Users	Unix-like CLI and XML-RPC API to manage VM life-cycle and physical boxes; and libvirt virtualization API
Scheduler	Requirement/rank matchmaker allowing the definition of workload and resource-aware allocation policies such as packing, striping, load-aware, affinity-aware…; and support for advance reservation of capacity through the Haizea VM-based lease manager
Virtualization Management	Xen, KVM and VMware connectors; and generic libvirt connector to other VM managers. Virtual Box planned for 1.4.2
Image Management	General mechanisms to transfer and clone VM images
Network Management	Definition of isolated virtual networks to interconnect VMs
Service Management and Contextualization	Support for multi-tier services consisting of groups of inter-connected VMs, and their auto-configuration at boot time
Security	Management of users by the infrastructure administrator
Fault Tolerance	Persistent database backend to store host and VM information
Scalability	Tested in the management of medium scale infrastructures consisting of hundreds of servers and VMs
Installation	Installation on a UNIX cluster front-end without requiring new services in the remote resources; and distributed in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)
Flexibility and Extensibility	Open, flexible and extensible architecture, interfaces and components, allowing its integration with any product or tool in the virtualization and Cloud ecosystems and management tool in the data center

Hybrid Cloud Computing

Capabilities for the extension of the local infrastructure with remote Cloud resources (Hybrid Cloud Computing)

Feature	Function
Cloud Plugins	Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts connectors
Federation	Support for simultaneous access to several remote clouds
Extensibility	Modular approach to develop new connectors

Cloud Interfaces

Capabilities for exposing Cloud interfaces to the private infrastructure (Public Cloud Computing)

Feature	Function
Cloud Interfaces for Users	Implementation of a subset of the EC2 Query API and the OGF OCCI API
Extensibility	The new OpenNebula Cloud API allows the implementation of new Cloud interfaces

Differentiating Factors

We invite you to use the previous feature tables to compare other existing Cloud technologies with OpenNebula. Key differentiating factors of OpenNebula with similar virtual infrastructure managers are:

Open, flexible and extensible architecture, interfaces and components that fit into any existing data center; and enable its integration with any product and service in the Cloud and virtualization ecosystem, and management tool in the data center
Open source software released under a very liberal license, Apache v2.0
Support for building any type of Cloud deployment: private, public and hybrid models

FAQ

You can find more information in our Frequently Asked Questions page.