OpenNebula
Open-source cloud management platform on KVM with native multi-tenancy, showback and hybrid provisioning: strong on paper, but ranked near the bottom on our production experience with the vendor.
OpenNebula (Apache 2.0, from OpenNebula Systems in Madrid) is a true cloud management layer rather than just a hypervisor manager: users, groups and virtual data centres, quotas, accounting and showback, a tenant-facing Sunstone portal, an official Terraform provider and OneFlow service templates. The 7.x line added OneDRS, OneSwap (VMware conversion, with batch migrations in 7.4, July 2026) and Veeam/NetApp/Pure integrations, and it can auto-provision edge clusters on AWS, Scaleway and i3D.net. The Community Edition is complete but lacks enterprise-certified releases, enterprise drivers and the support portal.
On paper that is a strong feature list; in production it did not hold up against Proxmox + MultiPortal. Our experience: a partner-unfriendly vendor, an architecture and documentation set that are far more complicated than they need to be, confusing commercials (the subscription model has to be decoded rather than read), and an attitude that made the relationship harder than the technology. These vendor-relationship observations are our direct experience and are stated as such.
Pros
- +Full CMP feature set out of the box: tenancy, VDCs, showback, self-service portal
- +OneSwap VMware conversion tooling and hybrid/edge provisioning to public clouds
- +Official Terraform provider and Ansible modules
Cons
- −In our experience: partner-unfriendly, with an attitude that made the relationship difficult
- −Over-complicated architecture and documentation; confusing commercials with opaque list pricing
- −Smaller community and ecosystem than Proxmox; enterprise integrations gated behind subscription
Pricing
Community Edition
$0/yr · annual commitment
Month-to-month: not published
- ✓No enterprise-certified releases, drivers or support portal
Specifications
| Rating | 2.3 |
| Pricing and plans | |
|---|---|
| Licensing | Per host / node |
| Metering / billing | ✓ |
| Features | |
| Self-service | ✓ |
| VMware migration | ✓ |
| Support | |
| Backends | KVM, LXC, AWS +2 |
| Multi-backend | ✓ |
| IaC | Terraform / OpenTofu (official), Ansible, XML-RPC API +1 |
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
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