CloudStack vs OpenNebula comparison

Apache and OpenNebula are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while OpenNebula is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.3. Apache holds a 7.0% mindshare in CM, compared to OpenNebula’s 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenNebula users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and OpenNebula are competing in the cloud infrastructure domain. OpenNebula has the upper hand due to its adaptability and ease of deployment across varied infrastructures.

Features: CloudStack offers comprehensive support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, advanced networking, and security features, and a centralized management system for scalability. OpenNebula has a lightweight footprint, provides a user-friendly interface, and supports flexibility across both private and public cloud platforms.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack can improve by streamlining its resource-intensive deployment process, simplifying the customization process, and enhancing its support for newer virtualization technologies. OpenNebula could benefit from expanding advanced networking capabilities, increasing support for multi-cloud environments, and improving its integration with additional enterprise applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula is known for its straightforward deployment and strong customer support, making it easy to manage various cloud infrastructures. CloudStack's deployment may require more resources, but it provides extensive documentation and community support for users.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack is an open-source solution, potentially involving higher initial expenses due to substantial customization and resource needs. OpenNebula, also open-source, presents lower setup costs and an attractive return on investment for small to medium-sized enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. OpenNebula

January 2025

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.0%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 7.0%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 8.5%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It can tell us where performance is lagging on the hardware layer, but the reporting on the application layer is lacking

The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer. I would like them to add some apps for physical device load resourcing and physical-to-virtual calculation. It gives excellent recommendations for the virtual layer but doesn't have the capabilities for physical-to-virtual analysis. Automated deployment is something else they could add. Some built-in automation features are helpful, but we aren't effectively using a few. We want a few more automated features, like autoscaling and automatic performance optimization testing would be useful.

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Wido Den Hollander

Community Ambassador at 42on

A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability

The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

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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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"The solution has a good optimization feature."

"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."

"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."

"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."

"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."

"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."

"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."

"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."

"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

More CloudStack pros

"It is quite easy to deploy."

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

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

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

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

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

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information."

"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."

"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement."

"From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2."

"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."

"The product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway."

"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."

"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."

"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."

"The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn."

More CloudStack cons

"They should add more features like object storage."

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

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"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."

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

"The solution is open source so is free."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Educational Organization

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

23%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

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What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is an open-source product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. It provides good value.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

The product had some limitations. So, I decided to write my own stack from scratch. The product does not have an easi...

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What do you like most about OpenNebula?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 19% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 10% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

Cloudify vs CloudStack

Compared 2% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 2% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

Red Hat CloudForms vs OpenNebula

Compared 2% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

December 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

January 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

December 2024

Download OpenNebula product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Vmops, Cloud.com

No data available

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IBM

Apache

Video not available

OpenNebula

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Apache

Demo not available

OpenNebula

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by companies to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions.

IBM Turbonomic leverages AI to continuously analyze application resource consumption, deliver insights and dashboards, and make real-time adjustments. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. By integrating with various cloud platforms, on-premise infrastructures, and containers, IBM Turbonomic provides a holistic view of the environment, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

The solution is designed to support complex IT environments, offering actionable insights and automated actions that help IT teams proactively manage application performance and infrastructure resources. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years.

IBM Turbonomic manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers to ensure efficiency and financial impact awareness. It automates resource allocation, balances memory dynamically, and provides robust performance metrics. Users benefit from its ability to prevent resource starvation and offer cost-saving recommendations through continuous management. Executive Dashboards provide insights for cost justification and resource management, making IT operations simpler with AI-driven automation and actionable recommendations.

What are the most important features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automated Resource Allocation: Dynamically allocates resources for optimal performance.
Dynamic Memory Balancing: Adjusts memory allocation to prevent resource shortages.
Right-Sizing: Sizes VMs accurately for Azure and on-prem environments.
Single Platform Management: Manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers.
Proactive Performance Optimization: Continuously optimizes performance to prevent issues.
Kubernetes Support: Enhances container management with robust support.
Cost-Saving Recommendations: Provides actionable tips for reducing expenses.

What benefits should users look for in IBM Turbonomic reviews?

Cost Reduction: Helps minimize expenses through efficient resource management.
Performance Improvement: Enhances application performance by preventing resource starvation.
Detailed Insights: Offers comprehensive analytics to justify costs and resource utilization.
Simplified IT Processes: Uses AI automation to streamline operations.

IBM Turbonomic is implemented across multiple industries, including finance for optimizing peak payroll processing, IT for enhanced virtual server management, and healthcare for reliable performance monitoring. Organizations benefit from its robust automation, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost savings.

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. OpenNebula

January 2025

Free Report: CloudStack vs. OpenNebula

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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