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OpenNebula pros and cons

Vendor: OpenNebula

4.1 out of 5

15 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

OpenNebula is a lightweight and customizable solution that integrates well with SAP Storage, offering features like live migration and effective scaling. Users appreciate its easy deployment and maintenance, but it lacks object storage, billing software, and a simple REST API. Some vital features, like backup, are limited to the enterprise edition. It relies on XML-RPC and lacks the efficiency of JSON outputs. Improvements are needed in hosting platform options and deployment processes.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

OpenNebula provides efficient user management and virtual data center functionalities that users find to be exceptionally valuable.

The platform is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize, offering great flexibility to organizations.

It integrates well with SAP Storage, enhancing its capability to serve diverse infrastructure needs.

OpenNebula's deployment and management processes are straightforward, often cited as key factors in choosing it over other cloud solutions like OpenStack.

Its scalability and live migration feature are invaluable, allowing great adaptability and frequent use by organizations.

CONS

OpenNebula should add more features like object storage and hot-add RAM and CPU, which have been anticipated for over two years.

Competitors offer billing software for small-sized public cloud transformations, a feature absent in OpenNebula.

A straightforward REST API is needed, as the current XML-RPC API is less efficient compared to the JSON outputs provided by REST.

OpenNebula lacks many cloud features and backup solutions are only in the enterprise edition.

The protocol for clusterization doesn't perform well and hosting platforms are limited, impacting deployment.

OpenNebula Pros review quotes

FOURES Jean-Philippe

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

Oct 3, 2023

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

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AB

CTO at Encha

Jun 4, 2025

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

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CTO at BE.iT SA

May 21, 2024

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

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Free Report: OpenNebula Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about OpenNebula. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2026.

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Manager, DevOps System Engineering team at MX

Jan 10, 2024

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

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Principal DevOps Engineer at Guavus

Oct 21, 2022

I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place.

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Cloud Engineer at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Nov 8, 2022

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.

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System Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 2, 2022

OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage.

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RS

Associate principal engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 27, 2022

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

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System Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 23, 2023

OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack.

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KP

reviewer0974376

Senior System Integration Engineer at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 20, 2022

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

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OpenNebula Cons review quotes

FOURES Jean-Philippe

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

Oct 3, 2023

The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources.

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AB

CTO at Encha

Jun 4, 2025

There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula.

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CTO at BE.iT SA

May 21, 2024

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

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Free Report: OpenNebula Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about OpenNebula. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2026.

893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Manager, DevOps System Engineering team at MX

Jan 10, 2024

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

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Principal DevOps Engineer at Guavus

Oct 21, 2022

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.

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Cloud Engineer at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Nov 8, 2022

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.

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System Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 2, 2022

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

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RS

Associate principal engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 27, 2022

Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement.

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System Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 23, 2023

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

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KP

reviewer0974376

Senior System Integration Engineer at a tech consulting company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 20, 2022

The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Management

Popular Comparisons

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Snyk vs OpenNebula

IBM Turbonomic vs OpenNebula

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

VMware Tanzu Platform vs OpenNebula

VMware Aria Operations vs OpenNebula

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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

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