OpenNebula: Overview

This post is part of the Open Source Cloud Computing series. For an Overview, please click on the Tag.
OpenNebula is an open source Software for Infrastructure as a Service Solutions, which started as a research project in 2005. The first public release was available in 2008. Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSuse currently support OpenNebula. The project is funded by European Institutions. OpenNebula provides Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) APIs, as well as OGF OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) APIs. OpenNebula also provides a self-service Portal to their users. OpenNebula has several third-party tools for Software Stack automation and it is easy to integrate a marketplace for applications in OpenNebula platforms. Administrators have their own portal, which is called “Sunstone”, and OpenNebula provides a Unix-inspired command line interface (CLI). OpenNebula Marketplace allows virtual appliances to be managed and run in OpenNebula environments.
Billing is basically easy as there is a fine-grained accounting and monitoring system available. Account Controls and quota management allows administrators to set limits on compute, storage and network utilization. To enable this, OpenNebula supports multi-tenancy built into the system. OpenNebula can be extended by popular directory services such as LDAP or Active Directory.
OpenNebula distinguishes between clusters and virtual data centers. Clusters are a pool of hosts that share data stores. Clusters also support virtual networks dedicated to load balancing, high availability and high performance computing. Virtual data centers are isolated virtual infrastructures where an administrator can manage the compute, storage and network capacity. OpenNebula is built for high availability with a persistent database as a backend.
A key challenge for OpenNebula is to allow the management of large enterprise data centers. To fulfill these needs, a complete life cycle for virtual resource management is possible and can be extended with a hooking system. The virtual infrastructure can be controlled, monitored and accounted to the correct tenants.
Header Image Copyright by Bob Familiar