As 2011 draws to an end, we'd like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2012. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters that we started in June.  Most of the time has been spent developing new features to continue to deliver the open-source industry standard for data center virtualization, offering the most feature-rich and flexible solution for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers.

Technology
The stable version of OpenNebula 2.2 was released in March with the new SunStone GUI and important new features for fault tolerance and scalability. Seven months later, in October, the project released OpenNebula 3.0 with management of zones and virtual data centers, new authentication methods with usage quotas, a VM template repository, a new monitoring and accounting service, and a new network subsystem with support for Open vSwitch and 802.1Q tagging. OpenNebula 3.0 features the latest innovations in cloud computing for the deployment of cutting-edge enterprise-ready on-premise IaaS clouds.

A few days ago we announced the availability of the Release Candidate of OpenNebula 3.2. This is the first version developed within the new rapid release development cycle that will allow us to more quickly deliver new features and innovations to the community as well as incorporate our users' requirements and feedback from the community. OpenNebula 3.2 focuses on network management, security management, enhanced VMware support, and a new OpenNebula self-service portal.

C12G Labs has delivered new versions of its addons to support VMware, accounting and LDAP.These addons are being incorporated into the main distribution of OpenNebula 3.2. In 2011, C12G announced several releases of the OpenNebulaPro distribution providing the rapid innovation of open-source, with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software.

Community
Last month, we celebrated OpenNebula's fourth birthday. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last four years. OpenNebula has evolved into an active open-source project with a community that, by many measures, is more than doubling each year.  In 2011, OpenNebula.org had more than 600,000 visits and 7,000,000 page views.

During 2011, several new components have been contributed to the OpenNebula ecosystem, likeSVMSched, Python bindings for OCA , VirtualBox driver, OpenVZ driver, StudiCloud or OCCI 1.1 Implementation, and many organizations contributed new guides and experiences to our blog. 2011 also saw a truly remarkable growth in the number of organizations and projects using OpenNebula, and many large companies and research centers were added to our list of featured users.

We revamped the OpenNebula community wiki, which now has its own site: http://wiki.opennebula.org/. Many OpenNebula community members have used this wiki to share howtos or provide links to guides, white papers, or use cases. We have collaborated with the main open-source projects in the cloud computing domain, such as CFengine, Libcloud, Puppet,Xen Cloud Platform, CompatibleOne, OpenVirtualization Alliance... , and companies in the virtualization market, such as Microsoft, which is providing technical guidance to help us add and maintain Hyper-V on the list of officially supported hypervisors. OpenNebula is now part of the repositories of the main Linux distributions: OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu.

We were excited to hear that several public organizations, like UK's Cabinet Office, the Canadian Cloud Best Practices Council, or the European Commission, reference OpenNebula as an interoperable enterprise-ready open-source alternative to proprietary solutions for cloud computing. We created a new working group to help support the development of standards around OpenNebula.

Outreach
OpenNebula presented 20 keynotes, invited talks and tutorials in the main international events in cloud computing in 10 different countries

About 2012
The final release of OpenNebula 3.2 will be available in a few days. This update of the 3 series focuses on network management, security management, and out-of-the-box enhanced support for VMware clouds. It also features a first version of the new OpenNebula Self-Service Portal for end-users of the cloud. But that's not all! We have also started developing the new features that will be available in OpenNebula 3.4, due in Q1 2012. In fact, we're planning four major releases of OpenNebula in 2012.

In the coming year, we hope to accelerate the initiatives to support our wide community of users and developers, and the ecosystem of open-source components and innovative projects being created around OpenNebula. In addition, we'll be ramping up some of our plans around developing training materials, collaborating with other communities, and doing our best to help grow the OpenNebula community in a sustainable way. We will also announce new collaborations with leading IT companies in open-source and innovation in cloud computing management.

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If OpenNebula has become such a successful open source project, it is in no small part thanks to its awesome community of users and developers. We have updated the list of people that have contributed to OpenNebula during the last four years. Please send us an email if we forgot to include your name. We appreciate your feedback and welcome your comments on all issues. The team will be monitoring this post for the next weeks or so and will try and answer all the questions we can.

Thanks for continuing to spread the word. We'd also like to take this opportunity to wish you health, happiness and prosperity in 2012 to you and your loved ones!

On behalf of the OpenNebula project.