A new open source project with ambitious aims is growing online: OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor).
The tool consists in a management layer that interconnects multiple Xen hypervisors to offer a general purpose grid.
The cloud created by OpenNEbula has some interesting capabilities like:
- dynamic resizing (adding a new physical host immediately extends the cloud size)
- workload balancing (the product selects the best location for each virtual machine)
- cloud partitioning (the cloud can be segmented and provide isolation for different services)
- fault tolerance (each component of the cloud is independent and its failure doesn’t impact others)
- on-demand provisioning (the number of virtual machine used for hosting a certain service are automatically selected)
- open and pluggable architecture (the product can be integrated with 3rd party tools to have more features, like virtual lab automation solutions, and can even support different hypervisors)
Such infrastructure seems similar to the one currently offered by Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, except for the on-demand provisioning capabilities (that the new project Scalr could provide soon).
OpenNEbula features a rich roadmap which includes support for VMware ESX and KVM.
The product is currently available only as Technology Preview and can be downloaded here.