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====== What is the OpenNebula Technology? ======
OpenNebula provides the **most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution** for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable on-premise IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.
OpenNebula can be primarily used as a platform to manage your virtualized infrastructure in the data center or cluster, which is usually referred as **Private Cloud**. OpenNebula supports **Hybrid Cloud** to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, enabling highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports **Public Clouds** by providing Cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.
====== What are our Design Principles? ======
The OpenNebula technology is the result of many years of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. OpenNebula was designed to address the **requirements of business use cases from leading companies and across multiple industries**, such as Hosting, Telecom, eGovernment, Utility Computing... The principles that have guided the design of OpenNebula are:
* **Openness** of the architecture, interfaces, and code
* **Flexibility** to fit into any datacenter
* **Interoperability** and **portability** to prevent vendor lock-in
* **Stability** for use in production enterprise-class environments
* **Scalability** for large scale infrastructures
* **SysAdmin-centrism** with complete control over the cloud
* **Simplicity**, easy to deploy, operate and use
* **Lightness** for high efficiency
====== What Are Its Benefits? ======
=== For the Infrastructure Manager ===
* **Faster respond to infrastructure needs for services** with dynamic resizing of the physical infrastructure by adding new hosts, and dynamic cluster partitioning to meet capacity requirements of services
* **Centralized management** of all the virtual and physical distributed infrastructure
* **Higher utilization of existing resources** with the creation of a infrastructure incorporating the heterogeneous resources in the data center, and infrastructure sharing between different departments managing their own production clusters, so removing application silos
* **Operational saving** with server consolidation to a reduced number of physical systems, so reducing space, administration effort, power and cooling requirements
* **Lower infrastructure expenses** with the combination of local and remote Cloud resources, so eliminating the over-purchase of systems to meet peaks demands
=== For the Infrastructure User ===
* **Faster delivery and scalability of services** to meet dynamic demands of service end-users
* **Support for heterogeneous execution environments** with multiple, even conflicting, software requirements on the same shared infrastructure
* **Full control** of the lifecycle of virtualized services management
=== For System Integrators ===
* **Fits into any existing data center** thanks to its open, flexible and extensible interfaces, architecture and components
* **Builds any type of Cloud deployment**
* **Open source software**, Apache license
* **Seamless integration with any product and service in the virtualization/cloud ecosystem and management tool in the data center**, such as cloud providers, VM managers, virtual image managers, service managers, management tools, schedulers…