About the OpenNebula Technology

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…