OpenNebula 3 Cloud Computing [Formato Kindle]

You have undoubtedly heard all the news about cloud computing. A trendy catchphrase that encapsulates some substantial hardware in data centers hooked to the Internet, like Amazon's offering, for example. But this book shows how it is possible to have your own corporate cloud, without having to reinvent many methods. OpenNebula is an open source approach that the text strongly recommends (hypes?) as being very modular and interoperable. Toraldo suggests that you can avoid locking in your code into some vendor's proprietary API.

Even more, there is no preference for a given hypervisor. You might have already used a hypervisor from VMware, which is perhaps the dominant supplier of hypervisors in the marketplace. Reflecting this commercial reality, OpenNebula can handle several types of VMware hypervisors. But it also supports Xen, which is the oldest open source hypervisor for linux.

Chapter 2 discusses the setup of OpenNebula on your hardware. The requirements are fairly general and the installation steps seem straightforward. While chapter 5 is the launching point for broad usage, once all the install steps are done. In this chapter, the parts about running virtual machines can be illuminating. While there could be many settings, OpenNebule picks a set of defaults that typically work for most case, which reduces the administrative load on you.

You may want to keep in mind the figure on page 127, in chapter 5. It is the state diagram for all the VM states. It helps you, by letting you refer to it as needed, to understand the running of a VM.

I have been using OpenNebula since version 2.2 onwards. The software has matured quite a bit since then incorporating more and more advanced features even as I write this review. Although the online manuals provides a comprehensive guide for installing and managing your OpenNebula cloud, at times this can become quite a challenge. This book does a very good job of presenting all the necessary guidelines and tips in a very coherent and systematic way. One of the big advantage of this book is that it covers some of the inner workings of the software too. It provides helpful tips on how and where to tweak the ruby codes to make OpenNebula custom fit your requirements. OpenNebula project is being actively developed, and will definitely incorporate more advance features and capabilities in upcoming releases. Some of the setup mechanisms discussed in this book is bound to become outdated, but some of the general technologies discussed will still make this book a very helpful tool to have in your possession.

Book is very compact in size, taking into account so much of content about OpenNebula. Last two years I have been installing, configuring and running OpenNebula for the research with few dozens of servers. The book has very helpful theoretical and mostly technical content.

For my work I referred to online documentation, blogs, OpenNebula forum and mailing lis. Finally, Giovanni Toraldo made an excellent work, collecting all of the content needed for very beginner to industry expert for set up, manage ad maintain OpenNebula cloud. It is very nice to have all content in one place. Book makes very easy to understand cloud internals, not only for OpenNebula but for all existing open source cloud solutions.

Also, I found "Tips and tricks" boxes very useful. They remind me easy traps which beginner can fall into during initial set up. Notes in the boxes are very handy, since it might save your days of digging down to the problem, reading forum posts or Googling. Latter was the case for me. So, content of the book requires keen attention, especially notes boxes.

It is great to have a book like this where author shares his insight experience and knowledge about open source project. Usually, thorough explanation of software modules, script and interaction between parts are not explained in the documentation, and almost impossible to find. This book includes in depth explanation of parts of the OpenNebula, such as image transfer manager, hooks, Ganglia integration and etc. I highly recommend this book for everyone getting into the cloud, regardless of their level of experience.