OpenNebula is the result of many years
of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual
machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. Its innovative features
have been developed to address the requirements of business use cases from
leading companies in the context of flagship European projects in cloud
computing. OpenNebula is being used as an open platform for innovation in
several international projects to research the challenges that arise in cloud
management, and also as production-ready tool in both academia and industry to
manage clouds.
As virtualization technologies mature
at an incredibly rapid pace, there is a growing interest in applying them to
the data-centre. After the success of cloud computing, companies are seeking
reliable and efficient technologies to transform their rigid infrastructure
into a flexible and agile provisioning platform. These so-called private clouds
allow you to provide IT services with an elastic capacity, obtained from your
local resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VM). Local resources can be
further combined with public clouds in a hybrid cloud computing setup, thus
enabling highly scalable hosting environments.
The main component involved in
implementing this provision scheme is the Cloud Management Tool, which is
responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable management of the cloud
resources. A Cloud Management Tool provides IT staff with a uniform management
layer across distributed hypervisors and cloud providers; giving infrastructure
users the impression of interacting with a single infinite capacity and elastic
cloud.
Because no two data centres are the
same, building clouds is about integration and orchestration of the underlying
infrastructure systems, services and processes. The Cloud Management Tool
should seamlessly integrate any existing security, virtualization, storage, and
network solutions deployed in the data-centre. Moreover, the right design and
configuration in the Cloud architecture depend not only on the underlying
infrastructure but also on the execution requirements of the service workload.
The capacity requirements of the virtual machines as well as their level of
coupling determine the best hardware configuration for the networking,
computing and storage subsystems.
Fig: OpenNebula architecture.
OpenNebula is an open-source Cloud
Management Tool that embraces this vision. Its open, architecture, interfaces
and components provide the flexibility and extensibility that many enterprise
IT shops need for internal cloud adoption. These features also facilitate its
integration with any product and service in the cloud and virtualization
ecosystem, and management tool in the data centre. OpenNebula provides an
abstraction layer independent from underlying services for security,
virtualization, networking and storage, avoiding vendor lock-in and enabling
interoperability. OpenNebula is not only built on standards, but has also
provided reference implementation of open community specifications, such us the
OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface. This open and flexible approach for cloud
management ensures widest possible market and user acceptability, and
simplifies adaptation to different environments.
Features
- Openness means you can run production-ready
software that is fully open-source without proprietary extensions that
lock you in. Yes, this means that OpenNebula does not
need enterprise extensions. Yes, OpenNebula is not a limited version
of an enterprise software… There is one and only one OpenNebula
distribution, and it is truly open-source, Apache licensed, and
enterprise-ready. There is no fragmentation.
- Simplicity means that you do not need an army of
administrators to build and maintain your cloud. OpenNebula is a product
and not a toolkit of components that you have to integrate to build
something functional. Moreover your cloud will run for years with
little maintain.
- Flexibility means that you can easily build a cloud to
fit into your data center and policies. Because no two data centers
are the same, we do not think there’s a one-size-fits-all in the cloud,
and we do not try to impose requirements on data center infrastructure. We
try to make cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT
infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor
lock-in.
- Scalability means that you can easily grow the
size of each zone and the number of zones. Some of our main users have
reported infrastructures with tens of zones distributed worldwide
that have executed several hundreds of thousands of virtual
machines.
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