No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco Intersight vs OpenNebula comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in Cloud Management
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.9%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Intersight1.6%
OpenNebula1.9%
Other96.5%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

HH
Systems Engineer at First Rand Bank Ltd.
Automation and seamless incident handling transform operational efficiency
I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT. For instance, if I need to find commands for UCS Manager, it should provide that information.
FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management."
"I find the integrations to be the most valuable feature."
"Using Intersight with this small team makes our job easy."
"Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up."
"Provides an overall view using a single portal."
"I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it."
"Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure."
"What I like best about Cisco Intersight is the way it's developing and converging into everything that the cloud has to offer, e.g. it's converging into one platform which is good."
"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."
"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."
 

Cons

"The product's setup should be easier."
"Cisco Intersight is a stable product, but it needs some improvement."
"The usability must be better."
"When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs and does not work."
"The product could be easy to use, similar to CloudIQ."
"Technical support from Cisco has been mixed. For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX."
"Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement."
"There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment."
"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 protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"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."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."
"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is cost-effective."
"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
The firmware management in the S-Series is not as Cisco described when we purchased it. You should be able to manage firmware without bringing the host down, but that is not the case. Unfortunately...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We are a cloud provider serving customers with IaaS.
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I have experience with B-Series, C-Series, and S-Series equipment. I would recommend the S-Series but not the C-Series. I would rate this solution an eight overall.
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 improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...
What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?
Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...
What advice do you have for others considering OpenNebula?
I recommend it, especially if you need a management interface for a small to medium private cloud. I would rate OpenNebula an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

Intersight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.