OpenNebula Reviews

Our company recently completed a project for a customer where we used the solution for cloud management. Our team included four developers, one QA, and a technical manager. 

The customer desired to move from a private to an open or hybrid cloud platform for their lease management system. The customer had dealership and manufacturer showrooms on different systems, controls, and software. We built their systems with different operating systems, CPUs, and memory and constructed a system to manage those resources. 

We use the solution as a super user to provide administration for all users, systems, and upgrades. We can remotely provide users with credentials or install needed items into certain umbrellas. 

The solution prepares and automates workflow because it allows for template and VM creation, assignment of users to certain VMs, and administrative privileges.

The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs. For example, I can create four templates with different configurations or various input parameters and then exchange the proper template to a VM. In contrast, Azure and AWS require multiple steps to achieve the same thing. 

The interface is quite simple and easy to use.

Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement. There are some kernels that limit hosting or cause issues with the CLI which only works on the server where it is installed. To solve this issue, we use a virtual box with user centers that run the solution for particular machines. 

Upgrades sometimes have compatibility issues that require changes on our end and this should be improved. For example, a 6.4 or 7.0 release should be downward compatible with the 6.0 version.  

The multiple stacks are built on the Python side but need a .NET extension. 

The CLI is on Ruby on rails so can be complex. 

An installation video that walks through all setup steps would be useful. 

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is quite stable.

The solution is scalable. There are open source limitations but it is easy to create plug-ins and consume APIs.

The solution is open source so there is no support. Documentation is quite good and queries on the forum are answered within 24-48 hours. Those who respond have good knowledge of the solution and are capable of helping.

Neutral

The setup is not particularly straightforward but the solution's forum includes detailed documentation and user comments. Answers to questions about installation are included in the forum. 

If there are any issues, you can always return to the forum for answers. No videos are available, so it is important to read through documentation and steps. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implemented the solution in-house and for our customer.

The solution is open source so is free.

We looked at OpenStack which offers a lease extension feature that is unavailable with the solution. It also is more well known and used by developers which adds to its market culture. 

For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services. It makes life easier from the infrastructure side. 

The solution's templates make exchanging VMs much easier than the multi-step processes of Azure and AWS.

Compatibility with Terraform CLI and Sunstone UI are a benefit. It is easy to move back and forth between UI and CLI to write commands.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have been actually giving demonstrations and other things surrounding the solution. OpenNebula in these parts is not so well known. There are a lot of people who could be using it without our knowledge. We are trying to showcase it to big customers to show them how to create a private cloud using OpenNebula. It's a cloud management tool.

It can be used as a Cloud Management Platform to manage different clouds using one dashboard, or you can actually create a private cloud, something similar to Amazon or AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, on your own premises.

It's GP based and is constantly being developed. It's open-source.

It is quite easy to deploy. 

It is actually worth it when it is for most organizations who are looking for how to set up a perfect Cloud.

The documentation is great and the community is active. 

It's very tough, depending on the requirements. There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds so that you can have different drones on public clouds and different public clouds, and making sure that everything is going to work seamlessly whether on-premises or on the cloud. Right now, on public clouds, you cannot actually install OpenNebula. 

We are community champions for OpenNebula. We have been using OpenNebula for quite some time. It's been around seven years.

This is a highly stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

This solution can scale up or down according to the need.

This is a GPL-based product. That means anybody can make use of it without taking any support. 

It is like Linux. Technically speaking, it all depends. We have not actually bought any software, this is a community product. Based on the community, there's a lot of information out there. It is being managed by highly competent people and the support you get from the community is going to be really good.

Positive

I haven't been involved with other cloud management tools. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. It's not hard at all. 

That said, you need to know what you are doing. It is not like Windows where you are going to just click through and are done. You need to know how to actually handle the product, and how to implement it. For people with a rich knowledge base, it is easy. If a user is comfortable with Linux, they should find it pretty straightforward. 

I'd rate the ease of setup for knowledgable users four out of five.

This is an open-source product.

We're integrating various solutions, including VM and KVM.

This is an excellent open-source, community-driven solution. 

New users should explore the solution and see if it can solve their issues. It's not a well-known product just yet, however, it is quite useful. New users just need to know what they are doing. Otherwise it may not meet their expectations. Having prior understanding of the product goes a long way towards making it a successful tool.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I've deployed OpenNebula a few times, primarily for public cloud hosting providers who want to get into the cloud business.

An excellent example of how OpenNebula improves an organization is with one of my clients who had fifteen to twenty-five customers, and he had to manage all customer needs by himself. If a client called him and said, "I need more disk space on this server," my customer had to log in and increase the disk space for that client. Another client would say, "I want a new IP on my server." My customer would have to log in, go into the server, then adjust it for the client.

When my customer migrated to OpenNebula, he gave each client a login credential and a dashboard so each client could log in to a specific dashboard and manage that instead of asking my customer to manage that dashboard.

OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients. For example, his client could go in and create a new digital machine, assign more disk space, increase memory, etc.

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.

The user-friendly UI of OpenNebula is also its most valuable feature.

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.

Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now. I speak from experience because I've worked with multiple private cloud solutions, and most of those solutions have template management and networking all figured out, making it easier for new users to start immediately.

With OpenNebula, you'd need a networking expert to have a full-fledged cloud. The OpenNebula team assumes that you know this. Still, most developers don't because they don't do networking, so you'll end up with a half-configured cloud or an OpenNebula that needs many inner workings to run. It would be great to have an OpenNebula assistant to guide users in configuring the servers. Otherwise, the solution may need to be rebuilt.

In the next release of OpenNebula, I'd like it to have an automatic network provisioning feature.

I've been working with OpenNebula since 2016, but most of my experience with it started in 2017. I've worked with the solution within the last eighteen months when a client requested an OpenNebula installation.

OpenNebula is a stable solution.

OpenNebula is scalable, and you can manage multiple servers, have various hosts, and configure redundancy.

My rating for the OpenNebula technical support is eight out of ten because I raised a question, but it took a while for support to reply. One of my customers was waiting on an answer, but then nobody responded, so I had to open a new question, and eventually, someone from support reached out to answer my question.

Positive

Deploying OpenNebula is extremely easy, and you can get an OpenNebula cloud in the morning.

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.

I evaluated CloudStack, but I prefer OpenNebula because of its simplicity, and setting it up is quicker.

I'm a system integrator for OpenNebula.

My customers use the PaaS version of OpenNebula and build a cloud using the solution. Customers build the hardware and then install OpenNebula. You can install instances of the host on Amazon or Google because OpenNebula integrates with other cloud providers. Still, in the four or five deployments I've done, I haven't seen any case of people bringing OpenNebula to a competitor. Instead, my customers build OpenNebula as a competitor to Amazon or Google.

Maintaining OpenNebula isn't difficult. Once you've set up the solution, it works. You don't need to spend a lot in terms of maintenance costs. Setting up OpenNebula could be challenging the first time because of all the networking and templates you need. Still, after you set up OpenNebula, nobody needs to touch it because it works fine.

I advise anyone who wants to start implementing OpenNebula to learn Linux and how the solution works first.

My rating for OpenNebula is eight out of ten.

We have implemented it for internal purposes and more for learning.

Integrated with KVM and VMware Hypervisors and on meager resources, just to check whether it works or not. We started this approximately five years back and it worked flawlessly.

A YouTube video shows the details of our implementation.

This can be used as a private/hybrid cloud and there are many well-known organizations that are using OpenNebula. These include the European Space Agency (ESA), BBC, China Telecom, TransUnion, and Trivago.

OpenNebula can also be used for High-Performance Computing.

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

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.

Moreover, it will be advantageous for any organization, as this can be local to all of its users and obviously faster compared to a public cloud because there are no latency problems.

It is also possible to integrate a Software-Defined Storage solution like LINBIT with OpenNebula, which brings a lot of agility to the solution.

The most valuable features are ease of use and easy installation.

It has all the features that will be required by an Organization and supports various Hypervisors.

With a detailed billing module, this can be used as a complete public cloud implementation, and we are waiting to see that module from OpenNebula.

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.

With the addition of this module, it will bring completeness to the overall offerings. We hope that OpenNebula listens to this and bring quickly the module.

We have been using OpenNebula for more than five years.

The stability is rock-solid.

This product is highly scalable.

We have not taken it, as we were able to do it on our own without any problems.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

We complete the deployment in-house.

Return on investment is extremely quick.

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 evaluated CloudStack before choosing OpenNebula.

vOneCloud is another interesting product from OpenNebula that can transform a normal VMware installation to mimic a full-blown public cloud. The best part is that this can be implemented on a VMware environment by just downloading an appliance.

Within 5-6 minutes, one can experience the power of VOneCloud.

This sort of product offerings from OpenNebula shows the ability of the Engineering Team of OpenNebula. Kudos to the OpenNebula team.

We mainly use OpenNebula for automatically deploying Kubernetes clusters and replacing our (old) Proxmox infrastructure.                                           

OpenNebula has been a game-changer for our organization. Since implementing it, we've experienced significant improvements in cost savings and efficiency, as well as in scalability and stability.

Deployments have been made easier and automation is a must now.    

The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable.             

The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements.    

We've been using OpenNebula for three years now.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable.

The product offers very good customer service and support.

Positive

We previously used Proxmox, which cannot automate stuff.

We also used OpenStack, which is too hard to maintain.

The product is pretty straightforward. The documentation helps a lot.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

All costs seem fair in terms of product pricing.

We evaluated OpenStack.

The performance is good. 

We are in the process of building a public cloud and we are using OpenNebula for its management. At the backend, we use ESXi 6.7, vCenter 6.7, and NSX. I believe that it's a really good combination for creating your cloud. We didn't choose the vCloud Director because of the license and we cannot pay for it. The reason is that we are in Iran, and we are faced with sanctions.

OpenNebula is a good product for the end-user cloud.

OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize.

The structure of the documentation is very messy. You can't find anything you want. When you search for features you are faced with many different topics and they don't have any connection to each other.

Compared to the documentation for VMware, it is really simple and messy. You find many topics that are not related to each other and you have to read all of the documents from beginning to end if you want to know how to set something up. For example, if you want to set up Kubernetes then you should be able to search for the top and learn how to do it. However, with OpenNebula, it is too difficult to do that.

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 keep postponing it to the next version and we are impatiently waiting for it. When the ability to hot-add or remove RAM and CPU inside the virtual machine is working, it will be very good.

The community has some weaknesses. For example, the answers are sometimes very short and contain no detail, like "Working on it", without answering with specifics.

Another weakness is that you have to develop a third-party portal from outside and connect using the NSX API directly from it.

We have been using OpenNebula for the past one and a half to two years.

OpenNebula is really stable.

We had to use some third-party modules, for example, for HA clustering. We bought some extractors and we also had to change some features and code in OpenNebula for security. 

We have more than 1,000 VDCs in our cluster.

We cannot use technical support due to sanctions so we rely on documentation, with trial and error. We would really appreciate being able to speak with the OpenNebula headquarters.

I tried to work with VMware vRA, which is very good, but because of its closed source, it's very difficult to add modules and customize it.

OpenStack is very complicated for the end-user so we did not use it because had we chosen it then we would have had to use many programmers and many infrastructure engineers. It is a very powerful solution, but I believe that it is only good for service provides rather than end-users.

 As it is now, we are almost done and our public cloud product is OpenNebula and the modules that I have mentioned. 

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

I was told about OpenNebula from a friend in the USA. They use it because it is very lightweight, stable, easy to use, and easy to customize. Based on that recommendation, we implemented it and I am personally okay with it.

Overall, this is a good product for the end-user.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

OpenNebula has better simplicity than vRA. It is designed perfectly for the end-user. OpenNebula has many features for the end-user in the private cloud and you can convert into the public web with some development. It's very user-friendly and very easy to use. We use it to provide the private cloud enterprise data center.

It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%. We can do automation for all the aspects of the data center. It gives more control to the whole organization, like marketing and technical departments with the ESP and admin layer. These are completely divided and we can manage our finance budget at the beginning of the year. 

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

They should add more features like object storage. They should improve some management feature for the storage, for example, they should put third party staff. The integration features should also be improved but I believe they are working on it. 

They should add HDM and HDS features. 

It is stable. 

We have around 1,200 users using this solution. This solution is used daily. 

I haven't had to contact their technical support yet. 

We previously used OpenStack. It's good for the services provider but not the cloud. OpenStack could be used for a data center. vRA is really good and better than OpenNebula but the license is really expensive. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The integration took around three weeks. The finalization takes three days between the security tests. The entire process will take less than one month. 

My team and I deployed the solution ourselves. The deployment required four staff members. 

vRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free.

It's free. You only need to pay for technical support but we can't use it anyway because of sanctions. 

It's really easy to use. If you already have infrastructure based on VMware and you don't want to pay for the license you should use OpenNebula but if you do have the budget you should use vRA. 

I would rate it between seven or eight out of ten. If they add certain features I would rate it a nine.