The OpenNebula Project has just announced the beta release of OpenNebula 4.2, the first update of the fourth series of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.
As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Flame Nebula (catalogued as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277) is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is located about 900 to 1,500 light-years away from Earth.
OpenNebula 4.2 gives users and administrators an easy way to create, publish, share, and manage multi-tier cloud applications and automatically define auto-scaling policies based on service level metrics and time schedule. The new service flow functionality converts an infrastructure cloud into a powerful environment for the execution of elastic business applications.