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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
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (8th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
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 January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 3.7%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OpenNebula3.7%
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)0.9%
Other95.4%
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.
Thomas Bennett - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its performance and speed are valuable. Its performance has helped me reduce costs."
"Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) definitely reduced our total cost of ownership."
"The scalability is good."
"The license portability is good enough."
"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."
"Customer service and technical support are definitely shining stars for Nutanix."
"Nutanix benefits my company as it reduces administration work, allowing me to spend more time away from hardware issues."
"In terms of dealing with our business-critical workloads, Nutanix is a highly scalable, highly resilient, and very high-performing solution."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"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."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
 

Cons

"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."
"Quality control needs to regulate the price-quality ratio."
"My suggestion would be getting up to speed on ransomware and evolving, as attackers are always one step ahead of what's out there."
"I'd like more flexible options to get in and out of migration modes."
"Having compatible feature sets between Azure and AWS would go a long way to improving the overall NC2 experience."
"The offering on GCP is a feature we have been waiting for to compare costs."
"When you go to the configuration part on the Nutanix site, the information is a bit high-level."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"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 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."
"The solution has been more costly at this point. We do not see any cost savings."
"The price is high."
"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."
"The solution's licensing can be very pricey."
"There are positives and negatives to licensing. It all makes sense now, but it took a while. When the licenses first changed, it was a bit confusing."
"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."
"I am working on one configuration that is priced at $50,000 USD, whereas another one that I'm working on is estimated to cost $250,000 USD."
"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 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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"The solution is open source so is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
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 do you like most about OpenNebula?
The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.
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...
 

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: December 2025.
879,853 professionals have used our research since 2012.