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OpenNebula vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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

OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converg...
Ranking in Cloud Management
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
HCI (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 2.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpenNebula2.5%
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure1.5%
Other96.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
KashifAli - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Head, Director of Sales and Operations at Core ISP Router
User-friendly GUI, capable technical support team but complicated license mechanism
Sangfor HCI's license mechanism is too complicated. The license agreement is a distributed license. Within the HCI platform, Sangfor HCI has multiple licenses in terms of services. Sangfor HCI has a separate license for the security services, a separate license for the Doctor services, and application services. They have multiple SKUs in separate forms. As per local market requirements, I think they need to couple up these or bundle up the license model.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is quite easy to deploy."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."
"OpenNebula has given us tremendous knowledge about cloud computing and about Cloud Management platforms, commonly known as CMP."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."
"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"The price of Sangfor is cheaper than other competing products."
"The product provides a single management console for managing everything."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"The extraordinary product quality, unmatched support services, and the third-generation HCI offering are some of the most valuable features of Sangfor HCI."
"Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management."
"It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
 

Cons

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"The cost must be improved."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"The documentation and support from the community are not as good or as mature as VMware or Hyper-V."
"The error reporting needs to be improved."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"Lacks network support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is a reasonably priced product."
"The solution is on-premise which does not have a subscription. However, there is a need to purchase support. The solution is on a perpetual license model. There is not any extra cost other than the standard licensing fees."
"Its price should be better, but I don't think they will change the price list. You have to pay for licenses, and you have to pay for support, so you have an annual fee. You can use the product without the fee, but it's really dumb because you need support. We are an IT company. We provide the product, and we need the support too for our customers."
"I would say its pricing is between cheap and reasonable and would rate it as three out of five."
"From a business perspective, we use Sangfor HCI due to its competitive pricing compared to other competitors such as Nutanix."
"The solution is very cheap."
"The product's pricing is less expensive and competitive than other alternatives. I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"Considering the capabilities provided, the product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What advice do you have for others considering OpenNebula?
I recommend it, especially if you need a management interface for a small to medium private cloud. I would rate OpenNebula an eight out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sangfor HCI?
I rate the pricing of Sangfor HCI at a five, as it is thirty to thirty-five percent more efficient than other solutions in terms of total cost of ownership.
What needs improvement with Sangfor HCI?
I would like Sangfor to have a presence on some public cloud offerings, such as Azure or AWS, to build disaster recovery sites. This functionality is currently missing in the Pakistani market.
What is your primary use case for Sangfor HCI?
The primary use case for Sangfor HCI involves running all workloads that were not for SAP on conventional servers using Hyper-V. We migrated all of these instances from Hyper-V to Sangfor HCI. We a...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
TOSHIBA TEC Singapore, J&T Express Indonesia, Crowne Plaza Vietnam, Hermina Hospital Indonesia
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.