Cisco UCS Director vs OpenNebula comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cisco UCS Director and OpenNebula are both strong contenders in the cloud management platform space. Cisco UCS Director shows a notable advantage in support and integration, particularly for enterprises with existing Cisco infrastructures. Conversely, OpenNebula's flexibility and open-source nature offer a unique appeal for businesses seeking customization opportunities.

Features: Cisco UCS Director includes comprehensive automation and orchestration workflows, seamless integration with Cisco hardware, and extensive multi-cloud management capabilities. OpenNebula offers multi-hypervisor support, an intuitive open-source framework, and hybrid cloud functionalities.

Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Director could enhance its adaptability for non-Cisco environments, simplify its setup process, and expand third-party integrations. OpenNebula might improve its user interface, streamline configuration processes, and enhance professional support services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director's deployment is streamlined for Cisco customers, though it might require additional effort for others. Its customer service is robust, fitting its enterprise focus. OpenNebula offers flexible deployment but may need more configuration. Customer service insights suggest room for improvement in support options.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Director involves higher upfront investment, aligning with its enterprise features and professional support. OpenNebula, being open-source, provides a cost-effective alternative, with potential savings offset by deployment complexity. The ROI for OpenNebula is attractive for those valuing flexibility and lower initial costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: July 2025).

Cisco UCS Director vs. OpenNebula

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.4%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.6%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair

Solution Architect and Senior Consultant at Keysight Technologies

Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement

Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.

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FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"It is quite easy to deploy."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

25%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

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Product Reports

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Cisco UCS Director

August 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

August 2025

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.