Cisco UCS Director vs OpenNebula comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cisco UCS Director and OpenNebula are both strong contenders in the cloud management platform space. Cisco UCS Director shows a notable advantage in support and integration, particularly for enterprises with existing Cisco infrastructures. Conversely, OpenNebula's flexibility and open-source nature offer a unique appeal for businesses seeking customization opportunities.

Features: Cisco UCS Director includes comprehensive automation and orchestration workflows, seamless integration with Cisco hardware, and extensive multi-cloud management capabilities. OpenNebula offers multi-hypervisor support, an intuitive open-source framework, and hybrid cloud functionalities.

Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Director could enhance its adaptability for non-Cisco environments, simplify its setup process, and expand third-party integrations. OpenNebula might improve its user interface, streamline configuration processes, and enhance professional support services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director's deployment is streamlined for Cisco customers, though it might require additional effort for others. Its customer service is robust, fitting its enterprise focus. OpenNebula offers flexible deployment but may need more configuration. Customer service insights suggest room for improvement in support options.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Director involves higher upfront investment, aligning with its enterprise features and professional support. OpenNebula, being open-source, provides a cost-effective alternative, with potential savings offset by deployment complexity. The ROI for OpenNebula is attractive for those valuing flexibility and lower initial costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: September 2025).

Cisco UCS Director vs. OpenNebula

September 2025

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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 UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

20th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 5.7%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
OpenNebula	5.7%
Cisco UCS Director	1.4%
Other	92.9%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair

Solution Architect and Senior Consultant at Keysight Technologies

Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement

Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.

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Thomas Bennett

Manager, DevOps System Engineering team at MX

Robust with great CLI tools and UI

I've found OpenNebula upgrades to be more complex than those of some of the competitors and the support to be mediocre. I would also like to see more and better ancillary tools related to OpenNebula, for example, more robust tools for backups, user support, etc. The support knows their software stack reasonably well. However, OpenNebula depends on so many open-source projects that they lack expertise. As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today.

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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

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

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

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

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

"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."

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

"It is quite easy to deploy."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

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

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

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

"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."

"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."

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

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

"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."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"The solution is open source so 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."

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

16%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

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...

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Product Reports

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Cisco UCS Director

October 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

October 2025

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

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

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.