SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

CloudScape III - Taking <strong>European</strong> Cloud Infrastructure Forward
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Standards & Interfaces
OpenNebula - A Reference Open Cloud
Stack to Enable Interoperable Enterpriseclass
Cloud Computing Platforms
General overview and field of application
OpenNebula is a fully open-source toolkit to build any type of IaaS cloud: private, public
and hybrid. The OpenNebula technology 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 IT companies and across multiple industries
in the context of groundbreaking projects in cloud computing, such as RESERVOIR.
Additionally, it is being used as reference open stack for cloud computing in several large
research and infrastructure projects, such as StratusLab, BonFIRE, or 4CaaSt.
The OpenNebula technology has matured thanks to an active and engaged community of
users and developers. The development is driven by its community in order to support the
most demanded features, and by the international research projects funding OpenNebula
in order to address the demanding requirements of several business and scientific use
cases for cloud computing. OpenNebula has proved to be a production-ready solution
that includes enterprise features such as security, robustness, scalability and performance
that many IT shops need for internal cloud adoption, either in scientific or in business
environments.
OpenNebula is downloaded several thousands times a month from its site, and the code
can also be downloaded from the software repository and from several commercial and
open-source distributions. OpenNebula is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to
research the challenges that arise in cloud management, and also as production-ready tool
in both academia and industry to manage clouds. Users include some of the world’s leading
telecom operators, hosting providers and compute centers of leading research institutions.
The importance of interoperability
OpenNebula emphasizes interoperability and portability, providing cloud users and
administrators with choice across the most popular cloud interfaces, hypervisors and
public clouds for hybrid cloud computing deployments, and with a flexible software that
can be installed in any hardware and software combination. The functionality provided by
OpenNebula and the components in its quickly growing ecosystem enable:
» » Interoperability in the private cloud by supporting most common hypervisors, such as
KVM, VMware or Xen, and many other virtualization stacks through its libvirt plug-in