[one-users] Self-service Cloud View use case

[Riccardo Brunetti]

Dear OpenNebula users.
We are setting up a IaaS service using opennebula 4.2, which should be
used by our users to perform a self-provisioning of virtual machine.
Basically, each user should choose one of the available VM templates and
one of the available VM images and self-deploy a given number of VM for
his personal use.
It seems that this is really the use case of the Self-service Cloud
described in:
 
http://opennebula.org/documentation:rel4.2:cloud_view

but there is something that we are still missing.
The point is that each user should be able to "buy" an instance, use it,
modify it, switch it off and on and do whatever he wants preserving the
changes.
Moreover, each time the machine is instantiated it must get the same IP
address. In other words, each instance should be persistent.
>From the above doc, it is not clear to us if this is actually the case.
If the images are not defined persistent, the changes are lost and, on
the other hand, we can't define them persistent since we want many users
be able to use them.
Moreover, it seems that it's possible to pin a given IP address only at
the level of the template but, once again, the same template is supposed
to be used by many customer.

The only possibility that we can see is to clone the same image for each
user, making each clone persistent, and provide the same number of
templates, but this is something that easily becomes unfeasible as soon
as the number of users increases.

Anybody has ever tried to make such a service? Can you please give us
some suggestions or show us what we are missing?

Best Regards.
R. Brunetti