Why OpenNebula?

OpenNebula is a simple but feature-rich, flexible, open solution to manage virtualized enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructures.

inlinetoc

What Are the Top Ten Reasons for Using OpenNebula?

  • Powerful and Innovative: Most advanced and innovative enterprise-class functionality for the management of virtualized data centers to build private and hybrid clouds
  • Infrastructure Agnostic: Fully platform independent with broad support for commodity and enterprise-grade hypervisor, storage and networking resources, allowing to leverage existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in
  • Adaptable, Extensible and Integrable: Open, adaptable and extensible architecture, interfaces and components to build your customized cloud service and make cloud operations conform to existing polcies
  • Interoperable: Cloud interoperability and portability providing cloud consumers with choice across standards and most popular cloud interfaces
  • Fully Open Source: OpenNebula is not a feature or performance limited edition of an Enterprise version, OpenNebula is truly open-source code, not open core, distributed under Apache license
  • Simple: Despite its technical sophistication and advanced functionality, OpenNebula is easy to download, install and update
  • Stable and Proven: 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
  • Mature: Development driven by user needs and matured through many release cycles
  • Enterprise-class Product: 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 updating process
  • One-stop Support: Wide variety of community and commercial support from the developers of OpenNebula

How Does OpenNebula Compare to Other Open Source Cloud Solutions?

  • OpenNebula focuses on Data Center virtualization. OpenNebula is more focused on data center virtualization and enterprise private cloud computing than on public AWS-like cloud features. OpenNebula provides sysadmins and devops with a flexible management platform that adapts to underlying processes and models for computing, storage, security, monitoring, and networking in their data centers. Other open-source solutions mainly focus on public cloud features and do not realize the full potential of virtualization in the data center.
  • OpenNebula brings richer functionality and wider integration capabilities. OpenNebula does not only bring an open-source implementation of the most common public cloud interfaces, but also a much richer and flexible management model and the latest innovations in data center virtualization for the deployment of enterprise clouds in your existing infrastructure. Other open-source cloud solutions are not fully vendor agnostic, providing a tighter integration and superior functionality on its company's hypervisor.
  • OpenNebula is delivered as a production-proven, packaged product. OpenNebula comprises all key functionalities for cloud computing, storage and networking with a single install. This reduces cost and complexity of the cloud, and ensures its long term stability and performance through a single integrated patching and updating process, and one-stop support. Other open-source alternatives provide a set of technologies with different maturity levels that have to be integrated to build something functional.
  • OpenNebula leverages power of user-driven development. OpenNebula's roadmap is completely driven by users needs with features that meet real demands, and not features that result from an agreement between IT vendors planning to create their own proprietary cloud solution. Many of our users are also active contributors to the software. OpenNebula has a fast development and release cycle to quickly react to changes in the state-of-the-art and incorporate the most-demanded functionalities.
  • OpenNebula is cloud API agnostic. OpenNebula is not an open-source implementation of a popular cloud interface, but a powerful cloud management tool that provides cloud consumers with choice of interfaces, from open cloud to de-facto standards. OpenNebula has been always committed to the implementation of the main specifications from standards bodies.

Can OpenNebula Coexist with other Cloud Management Platforms?

Absolutely, many of our users have reported experiences using OpenNebula together with other popular cloud platforms like OpenStack, Eucalyptus or vCloud.

  • The hybrid cloud capabilities of OpenNebula enable to implement cloudbursting architectures where an OpenNebula private cloud bursts to an vCloud-, OpenStack- or Eucalyptus-based cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes.
  • The integration capabilities of OpenNebula allow its integration with OpenStack Swift or OpenStack Quantum for object/block store and networking management respectively in the data center.
  • OpenNebula can work as a data center virtualization manager within an OpenStack or Eucalyptus cloud.