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Many leading organizations use OpenNebula as an infrastructure tool for building enterprise private clouds to simplify and optimize internal data center operations. These organizations see private cloud as the next logical step after server virtualization and consolidation. Enterprise-class clouds provide access to a security-rich, flexible environment for production workloads to help reduce costs, shorten cycle times for faster time to market and improve quality.
The most widely used hypervisor in enterprise environments is VMware. OpenNebula is a good choice to manage ESX servers, and comes with many other goodies. For instance, you will be using a flexible platform that fits into your environment, and an open solution (so avoiding vendor lock-in), based on standards and interoperable with other hypervisors.
====== What Are Our Unique Functionalities to Build Enterprise Private Clouds? ======
Compared with other open-source cloud management platforms, OpenNebula comes with all the ingredients needed to build and manage Enterprise Clouds and support production workloads.
**OpenNebula is production-ready software**
* **Single Install and Upgrade Process**: OpenNebula comprises all key functionalities for enterprise cloud computing, storage and networking in a single install, and ensures its long term stability and performance through a single integrated patching and upgrade process.
* **Stable and Proven**: OpenNebula is rigorously tested through an internal quality assurance process and by a large community with scalability, reliability and performance tested on many massive scalable production deployments.
* **Support**: You can receive best-effort community and SLA-based production support directly from the developers.
**OpenNebula easily integrates with third-party tools**
* **Integration with Data Center Services**: OpenNebula is fully platform independent with broad support for commodity and enterprise-grade hypervisor, monitoring, storage, networking and user management services.
* **Highly Customizable**: Because no two enterprise data centers are the same, OpenNebula can be easily adapted to fit into your data center and leverage existing IT investments.
**OpenNebula is a unique software for the management of enterprise clouds**
* **Virtual Infrastructure Management Adjusted to Enterprise Data Centers**: The entities that OpenNebula work with, as abstractions of the physical and virtual resources, are a reflection of the typical resources found in enterprise Data Centers. These data models, a complete life-cycle management, an advanced monitoring and accounting system, and fine-grained multi-tenancy enable advanced techniques for capacity and performance management.
* **High Availability and Business Continuity**: OpenNebula brings support for high availability architectures, a persistent database backend with support for high availability configurations, and configurable behavior in the event of host, VM, or OpenNebula instance failure to provide easy to use and cost-effective failover solutions.
* **Unique Features for Private Clouds**: OpenNebula brings the most advanced and innovative enterprise-class functionality for the management of virtualized enterprise data centers and clouds, such as on-demand provision of virtual data centers, management of multiple zones, external cloud connectors for hybrid cloud computing, self-service portal and catalog, service management, scheduling, clustering, multiple datastores…
====== Why Use OpenNebula on your Existing VMware Infrastructure? ======
VMware hypervisors of the ESX family are fully, out-of-the box supported by the latest versions of OpenNebula (3.0+). If you have a server farm based on any of the ESX versions, then you can make use of OpenNebula to better manage your physical (and virtual) resources in order to build a private cloud and provide virtualized environments. OpenNebula is the most powerful open-source alternative to VMware datacenter and cloud suite, delivering enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability with broader platform support and integration capabilities.
* **Manage multiple storage backends**. Have multiple storage sources (datastores) serving the same host, or group hosts in clusters served by different storage servers.
* **Manage virtual networks**. OpenNebula ships with network drivers that allows for an automatic management of VMware port groups. In this fashion isolated, VLAN based virtual networks can be managed through OpenNebula and operated by VMware hypervisors.
* **Virtual Machine lifecycle management**. All the states of the VMs can be manipulated from OpenNebula: submit, stop, resume, cancel, shutdown, restart.
* **Powerful GUI**. Sunstone provides a window to both your physical (ESX farm) and virtual infrastructures. End users can access the cloud through the Self-service web interface. VMware resources can be managed through a web browser. Hello, Linux!
* **Complete private cloud API**. Manage physical and virtual resources through OpenNebula rich native API. Script tasks to automate everyday operations.
* **Use Public APIs**. Access virtual resources running on top of ESX hypervisors through public cloud APIs: Amazon EC2 (de facto standard) and OCCI (de jure standard).
* **Cloudbursting**. Offload your services’ peak demands to a public cloud provider.
* **Enjoy multi-tenancy on virtual resources**. Use Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) to isolate computing resources to be used by members of different entities. Manage multiple OpenNebula instances in a centralized dashboard: oZones GUI.
* **Role based user management**. Manage user permissions regarding physical and virtual resources. Fine tune permissions using Access Control Lists.
* **External authorization modules**. Use in-house LDAP or Active Directory user base to authorize virtual resources. No need to replicate this information in OpenNebula.