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Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) 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

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (6th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
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 March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 2.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)1.2%
OpenNebula2.5%
Other96.3%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

JY
Manager, Information Technology Engineers at IBC Bank
Enables us to grow at the speed of business and be ready for whatever is coming
What I admire most about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is its scalability; that option that everybody seems to eventually go to is cloud, and we're ready for that when we decide. This scalability feature has improved my company because we can grow at the speed of business, and that's very important. We're not limited by the hardware that we have. We allow ourselves room for growth, and we can literally grow from today to tomorrow to ensure that we're handling our growth. The scalability is critical for us, especially in the banking industry, where we just get bigger every year.
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

"We spent a year on this ASR project and had so many issues when we attempted to do a failover. It took four to 24 hours to failover a couple of SQL VMs. During our first test deployment of NC2, it only took three or four minutes to failover and recover our VMs. This blew the Microsoft platform out of the water."
"The feature I find most valuable about Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is the portability."
"Being able to spin up or reduce the cluster size based on the needs that we have has been helpful for us."
"Our previous solution was inconsistent and took a long time to recover. NC2 consistently delivers full disaster recovery in a few hours. That was a huge selling point. We need to know that our business can be up and running in hours, not days. We didn't have a real disaster recovery plan before NC2. That's a goal we've been trying to achieve, and Nutanix gives us what we need to make that a reality"
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is very good, particularly Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), as it is a very good option because if you need more resources, we can add them instantly."
"There is ease of use. It is very important for our customers to have one centralized management console. Scalability is also very important for our customers."
"Its performance and speed are valuable. Its performance has helped me reduce costs."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Clusters is its storage infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."
"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."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"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 has very good integration with SAP Storage."
"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."
 

Cons

"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is a very costly solution compared to on-prem. Customers are not moving to Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) because of the price, the license cost, and everything."
"We cannot use Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) for data center extension or scaling workloads on demand right now based on the way that we have our network configured, but in the future, the plan is to build a greenfield site and re-engineer some of those features."
"There are still some things that could be improved about the product."
"The product could be improved in scalability and support services."
"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) could be improved as it currently looks and feels slightly different than on-prem. Engineering could aim for a look and feel closer to on-prem, making it easier for newer users."
"My impression of Nutanix's license portability is that I wish it had an easier transition from one license to license. I know in the last three to four years, the model has changed three times, making it harder for me to understand the transition from one license model to the next and what that means for me."
"When you go to the configuration part on the Nutanix site, the information is a bit high-level."
"Some features that people say Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) lacks could be simplified to make it easier, such as a single pane of glass, and getting more into Google Cloud would be very helpful for our team as we're working on GCP interfaces."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"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."
"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."
"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing portability can be very interesting. At the moment, I am working with Nutanix Appliances with the AHV as a hypervisor. I did not have a chance to ask for portability between platforms, but it will be good if you can have portability between multiple types of platforms."
"I feel that the prices could be improved, but the truth is that I am very happy. The license price keeps increasing, but I am confident that it is much more reasonable than other brands."
"The solution's licensing can be very pricey."
"The transition from the perpetual license to what they have now is, from a business perspective, understandable, but from an operational and cost perspective, for me, it is really expensive. However, our partners at Nutanix did work with us recently and reduced a huge licensing cost for us."
"I'm not familiar with the contracts, but I thought the process was pretty seamless. Licensing for the Nutanix part was the same as licensing something on-prem, and since it runs on bare metal EC2, there was no new process we had to go through—it fits into our existing procurement processes nicely. I appreciate Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)'s license portability."
"The price is high."
"The solution has been more costly at this point. We do not see any cost savings."
"The licensing model of Nutanix is complex."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"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
20%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
I'm not familiar with the contracts, but I thought the process was pretty seamless. Licensing for the Nutanix part was the same as licensing something on-prem, and since it runs on bare metal EC2, ...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
From an improvement perspective, I cannot see anything at this point because I used those Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) at that moment, but I am currently not using it. The pricing could be lower.
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?
I use the workload migration feature between clouds, such as migrating from VMware to Nutanix. I use Nutanix Move to migrate workloads from Nutanix Move. However, in some cases with our failover cl...
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

Nutanix Clusters
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

The Home Depot, JetBlue, Hyundai, ShiftLeft
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 Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.