OpenNebula Reviews

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 used to host an application that could help the organization. It helped all the employees and the partners access all our products which we had set up as a virtual lab in OpenNebula.

I liked that we could create templates (as many as we want) and we could deploy as many copies of them as and when required. 

With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them. You just give the number, and it will deploy right away.

It is a stable product.

The solution isn't very expensive. 

The marketplace feature that they had wasn't really up to the mark as they published it. That is something that they could improve.

They need to improve their customer support as well.

The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing. At first glance, it would all look okay. However, they need to be very specific about how their storage is occupied at the OpenNebula level. That would give a pretty clear idea to the end user on how to deal with it and how to plan ahead. 

I've used the solution for around three years. 

The stability is pretty good. I would rate it seven out of ten. There aren't bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

From a management perspective, it is a pretty small environment. It is just two or three of us managing things. From the end-user perspective, we have hundreds of users at a time.

Customer support could be improved.

They don't have phone support. They only have support via email or their ticketing system. That's it. If you have an urgent issue, you just have to wait for their reply instead of calling them up and getting things on track right away.

You go back and forth a lot of times instead of a quick ten-minute call.

Neutral

I previously used VMware. From the management perspective, if you give both products to the administrators in the environment, OpenNebula is much more user-friendly and easy to manage than vCloud Director.

The solution was easy to set up. 

I'm not sure if they came up with a new version with a new improvement feature. I'm not aware of that right now.

The deployment itself only took a few days. You may have to set up dependencies and do cabling, et cetera. We had to set up on our end like the hardware and cabling and the basic environment setup. Then there was a setup that was required from their end. They did the initial setup and they taught us how to do it so we could handle things going forward.

The costs are pretty low The solution is cheap. 

We're a customer. 

I cannot recall the exact version of the solution I used. It might have been version five or three. 

Potential new users will need to understand basic networking and how things work at the network level, and then it would be right for them.

I'd rate the product seven out of ten. The solution is good. However, support is not. 

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.

In my previous role at a system integration company, we used OpenNebula to deploy private clouds for our clients. My current company uses it for our own needs. 

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

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

I have worked with OpenNebula for more than three years.

I rate OpenNebula nine out of 10 for stability. I've never experienced any critical failures or lost data. 

OpenNebula has the potential to be highly scalable, but I've never done a massive deployment. My deployments have never had more than fifteen nodes. 

I can compare OpenNebula to OpenStack and VMware. OpenStack is also free, but it's too complicated to deploy into a production environment without specialized knowledge. It's okay for a testing environment but almost impossible to deploy in production. 

Setting up OpenNebula is simple. We deploy it on on-premise servers in our data centers. 

We use the free community version of OpenNebula.

I rate OpenNebula eight out of 10. 

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. 

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.

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.