OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

OpenNebula and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.0, while Broadcom is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. OpenNebula holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,169 Views
3,011 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 70 VMware Cloud Director reviews

4,538 Views
3,812 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Cloud Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and OpenNebula operate in the cloud infrastructure platform market, with VMware Cloud Director being more suited for enterprise-level deployments due to its comprehensive service offerings, scalability, and advanced features. OpenNebula, on the other hand, appeals to smaller operations because of its open-source nature and ease of use.

Features: VMware Cloud Director is known for extensive cloud service offerings, multi-tenancy, and integration abilities with VMware’s suite, making it robust for enterprise use. OpenNebula is appreciated for its lightweight nature, simple deployment, and support for multiple hypervisors, offering flexibility as a cloud management platform.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could enhance its public cloud integration, simplify user experiences, and improve HTML5 support. Users seek better alignment with AWS or Azure. OpenNebula requires stronger community support, better template management capabilities, and advanced cloud features to compete effectively with rivals.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director offers flexible deployment options across various cloud environments, though setup can be complex. Its customer support receives mixed reviews concerning timeliness. Conversely, OpenNebula is praised for straightforward deployment in on-premises setups and customer service simplicity.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director's high costs may not suit budget-constrained projects, although its benefits can lead to substantial ROI over time due to enhanced service delivery. OpenNebula, with its cost-effective approach, especially for open-source users, presents an attractive pricing model, delivering quick ROI through low initial investments and operational savings.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

April 2026

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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

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

15th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.9%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director	2.7%
OpenNebula	1.9%
Other	95.4%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

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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KuldeepSingh4

Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility

VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

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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

"It is quite easy to deploy."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

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

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

"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."

"OpenNebula has given us tremendous knowledge about cloud computing and about Cloud Management platforms, commonly known as CMP."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

"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."

More OpenNebula pros

"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."

"It optimizes the process for cloud structure."

"We decided to go with vCloud Director because of its onApp features."

"This solution has helped us make money and provision our clients faster."

"Our customers host their applications with us like they would host it with AWS or Azure, so the most valuable part of the product for us is the ease of creating resources for them to run their applications and infrastructure for doing business."

"We can run it on self-hosted systems, and we are happy with the stability of vCloud Director."

"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

More OpenNebula cons

"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform."

"VMware should simplify the whole solution as it comprises many different components, making management hard."

"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."

"Even if there are some transition scripts or similar to help move certain aspects of functionality the transition is going to be a painful process."

"There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products."

"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"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."

"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."

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

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."

"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."

"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."

"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

University

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	36

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?

VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...

See all answers

What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?

For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...

See all answers

Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?

When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...

See all answers

Comparisons

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

CloudCheckr vs OpenNebula

Compared 4% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

April 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

April 2026

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

No data available

vCloud Director

Overview

OpenNebula offers scalability, ease of deployment, and integration capabilities that enhance cloud management for enterprises. It supports both virtual and bare metal resources, providing a versatile cloud management experience.

OpenNebula provides a robust platform for building, managing, and automating private and public clouds. Its compatibility with platforms like VMware, KVM, and containers makes it ideal for businesses hosting virtual private clouds and deploying Kubernetes clusters. OpenNebula's API and SDK facilitate automation and integration, allowing organizations to connect with IT systems effectively. Despite its strengths, improvements in object storage, REST API integration, and UI enhancements are needed. The documentation can be disorganized, and users encounter challenges with upgrades and community support.

What are key OpenNebula features?

Scalability: Easily manage resources for growing cloud environments.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies cloud management tasks.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with IT systems using robust API and SDK.
Hypervisor Support: Works with multiple hypervisors and container platforms.

What benefits do users find in OpenNebula?

Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations, reducing management complexities.
Versatility: Offers support for both virtual and bare metal resources.
Community and Documentation: Though needing improvement, provides valuable resources for users.
Cost-Effectiveness: Lightweight nature minimizes resource expenditure.

OpenNebula implementation spans industries where cloud automation and management are critical. Companies utilize OpenNebula for deploying private clouds and managing infrastructure. Its support for Kubernetes clusters is beneficial in tech-driven sectors, highlighting OpenNebula's adaptability to different operational needs.

OpenNebula

VMware Cloud Director is a versatile platform renowned for its multi-tenancy, automation capabilities, and ease of use. It integrates with platforms like Amazon and Azure, enabling networking flexibility, scalability, and efficient virtual data center deployment with a resilient and intuitive interface.

VMware Cloud Director empowers organizations by offering a self-service portal for independent resource management, robust security features, and efficient orchestration. Its integration with Amazon and Azure enhances cloud functionality, while scalability allows seamless addition of resources. Despite its strengths, there is a need for improved integration with AWS and Azure, a more intuitive UI, better private cloud support, advanced automation, simplified installation, and competitive pricing. Users seek built-in billing, seamless networking, stable updates, detailed documentation, robust technical support, and open-source compatibility.

What are the key features of VMware Cloud Director?

Multi-tenancy: Supports multiple tenants with resource isolation.
Automation: Enables automated deployment and management of resources.
Integration: Compatible with platforms like Amazon and Azure.
Security: Offers robust security features to protect data.
Self-service portal: Empowers users to manage resources independently.
Networking flexibility: Facilitates efficient network management.
Scalability: Allows easy resource expansion.

What benefits or ROI should users expect from VMware Cloud Director?

Resilience: Ensures reliable cloud infrastructure management.
Clear dashboarding: Provides transparent oversight of resources.
Service extension: Expands capabilities to enhance customer satisfaction.
Resource optimization: Maximizes resource utilization and efficiency.

In industries such as cloud infrastructure hosting, VMware Cloud Director supports the creation and management of virtual data centers. Organizations leverage it for delivering public and private cloud services, enabling the deployment and management of applications. Service providers utilize its capabilities to streamline customer onboarding and foster infrastructure segregation, catering to diverse cloud requirements.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

April 2026

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

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