As first post in this community blog, I would like to introduce one of the new projects within the Xen Community. We started OpenNebula a few years ago in order to provide an open-source alternative to commercial tools for the dynamic management of VMs on distributed resources.  OpenNebula provides an efficient, dynamic and scalable management of Xen VMs within datacenters, private clouds, involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. Let me enumerate its main features and provide some links for more details:
- Open architecture and interfaces, allowing its integration with other tools in the virtualization ecosystem and its adaptation to the requirements of a given infrastructure.
- Generic framework to define new VM placement policies. The default scheduling policy determines the best host to start a VM according to requirement and rank expressions consisting on infrastructure parameters. Support for advance reservation of capacity is provided through the Haizea VM-based lease manager.
- Powerful API and CLI  for monitoring and controlling VMs and physical resources, libvirt implementation and integration with Globus Nimbus to provide WSRF and EC2 interfaces.
- Image management to transfer and clone VM images, using a modular component that can be easily extended and integrated with third-party developments; and networking management enabling the definition of virtual networks.
- Dynamic scaling of service workloads by accessing Amazon EC2 to supplement local resources with cloud resources to satisfy peak or fluctuating demands. This functionality has been evaluated in the dynamic scaling of web servers and computing clusters.
- OpenNebula is distributed under Apache license, v2.0, and we maintain a public track for software development. The releases incorporate guides, reference documentation, howtos and use cases; and we provide best-effort support through a mailing list.
OpenNebula is one of the components being enhanced in the context of RESERVOIR, European research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing.
The OpenNebula Team
