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Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs OpenNebula comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (8th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 3.7%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OpenNebula3.7%
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)0.9%
Other95.4%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

JY
Manager, Information Technology Engineers at IBC Bank
Enables us to grow at the speed of business and be ready for whatever is coming
What I admire most about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is its scalability; that option that everybody seems to eventually go to is cloud, and we're ready for that when we decide. This scalability feature has improved my company because we can grow at the speed of business, and that's very important. We're not limited by the hardware that we have. We allow ourselves room for growth, and we can literally grow from today to tomorrow to ensure that we're handling our growth. The scalability is critical for us, especially in the banking industry, where we just get bigger every year.
FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature I probably appreciate the most about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is its scalability—how quickly I can deploy more nodes on a cluster and remove nodes."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Clusters is its storage infrastructure."
"I'm not an AWS expert at all, but I can totally manage my Nutanix clusters, the same as I do on-prem. The fact that I can quickly and easily stand up servers or nodes instantly has been an amazing help."
"Nutanix has the best customer service."
"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) scales with the needs of my company."
"Its performance and speed are valuable. Its performance has helped me reduce costs."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Clusters is to protect the data."
"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) benefits my company as it reduces administration work, allowing me to spend more time away from hardware issues."
"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."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."
"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."
"It is quite easy to deploy."
"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."
 

Cons

"The biggest weakness with Clusters at this point is that the adoption rate is low because customers don't know enough about it."
"Networking is one of the biggest improvements. They have a great stock already, but some use cases, particularly around incrementally spinning up workloads, haven't been considered closely enough."
"We cannot use Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) for data center extension or scaling workloads on demand right now based on the way that we have our network configured, but in the future, the plan is to build a greenfield site and re-engineer some of those features."
"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) could be improved with some more tools that could help synchronize on-prem and cloud stuff better."
"My impression of Nutanix's license portability is that I wish it had an easier transition from one license to license. I know in the last three to four years, the model has changed three times, making it harder for me to understand the transition from one license model to the next and what that means for me."
"Improvement is obviously needed in pricing; I cannot pinpoint where else I would suggest improvements."
"Having compatible feature sets between Azure and AWS would go a long way to improving the overall NC2 experience."
"The most significant improvement would be to streamline the starting point so that we could kick off the deployment with one node and then scan out that deployment without a need to restructure or reformat anything."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"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."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is high."
"There are positives and negatives to licensing. It all makes sense now, but it took a while. When the licenses first changed, it was a bit confusing."
"The solution's licensing can be very pricey."
"The licensing model of Nutanix is complex."
"The licensing portability can be very interesting. At the moment, I am working with Nutanix Appliances with the AHV as a hypervisor. I did not have a chance to ask for portability between platforms, but it will be good if you can have portability between multiple types of platforms."
"I am working on one configuration that is priced at $50,000 USD, whereas another one that I'm working on is estimated to cost $250,000 USD."
"I'm not familiar with the contracts, but I thought the process was pretty seamless. Licensing for the Nutanix part was the same as licensing something on-prem, and since it runs on bare metal EC2, there was no new process we had to go through—it fits into our existing procurement processes nicely. I appreciate Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)'s license portability."
"The solution has been more costly at this point. We do not see any cost savings."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
I'm not familiar with the contracts, but I thought the process was pretty seamless. Licensing for the Nutanix part was the same as licensing something on-prem, and since it runs on bare metal EC2, ...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
From an improvement perspective, I cannot see anything at this point because I used those Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) at that moment, but I am currently not using it. The pricing could be lower.
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
I use the workload migration feature between clouds, such as migrating from VMware to Nutanix. I use Nutanix Move to migrate workloads from Nutanix Move. However, in some cases with our failover cl...
What do you like most about OpenNebula?
The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.
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...
What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?
Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Clusters
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The Home Depot, JetBlue, Hyundai, ShiftLeft
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.