In my post "Interfaces for Private and Public Cloud Computing", I briefly described the main differences between public and private cloud computing from the perspective of their different application scope and interfaces. My position was that a private cloud interface should provide rich enough semantics, far beyond of that provided by public clouds (such as Amazon EC2 APIs), to ease the integration of the distributed virtual infrastructure in the data-center management stack, including user and administration support. Such interface should provide additional functionality for virtualization, networking, image and physical resource configuration, management, monitoring and accounting, not exposed by pubic cloud interfaces.

I also envisioned that, although conceived as a library to interface with different virtualization technologies, the libvirt virtualization API could be used as interface for private cloud computing. This vision is now a reality, libvirt version 0.6.5 was released last week including an OpenNebula driver that provides a libvirt interface to a distributed virtual infrastructure consisting of local resources running VMware, KVM or Xen; and Cloud resources on Amazon EC2 or ElasticHosts.

As Rubén S. Montero describes in his post "Libvirt 0.6.5 Released… Including a OpenNebula Driver": "Libvirt is evolving into a very rich and widely used interface to manage the virtualization capabilities of a server, including virtual network, storage and domain management. So, libvirt can be a very effective administration interface for a private cloud exposing a complete set of VM and physical node operations. In this way, libvirt + OpenNebula provides a powerful abstraction for your private cloud."

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