A little more than two years ago, virtualization.info covered an emerging project called OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor) which was one of the earliest open source solutions to manage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture built on Xen.
The project, based on a research started in 2005 by Ignacio M. Llorente and Rubén S. Montero, matured a lot in these years. It now offers cloud management capabilities for most virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Server and any other virtual machine monitor that supports the libvirt libraries.
Plus, it offers capability to manage hybrid clouds, through the support for public clouds like Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts.
Version 1.4 of OpenNebula was released in December 2009, and an upcoming 1.4.2 is expected to introduce support for Oracle VM VirtualBox.
C12G Labs, the company that was born to offer a commercial implementation of OpenNebula and appropriate support, just announced that OpenNebula now supports the VMware vCloud Express APIs.
The vCloud Express APIs are a subset of the vCloud APIs submitted by VMware to become a standard. OpenNebula refers to the specifications published by Terremark, one of the just four hosting providers worldwide that is offering a vCloud Express implementation, and the one where VMware invested $20M last year.
The new OpenNebula connect for vCloud Express doesn’t just work with the Terremark implementation. It has been tested to work also with the meta-APIs that the project Deltacloud offers.