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OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

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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

OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.5%
OpenNebula1.5%
Other96.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AB
CTO at Encha
A highly scalable solution that gives good value for money, but it does not have payment gateways
OpenNebula's templates are weak, and it could do something to make template creation a lot easier to use. The solution has a template for every single VM you create, which is not clever. You should be able to use a template for many different virtual machines. There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is quite easy to deploy."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."
"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."
"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"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."
"The solution is reliable and performs well."
"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."
"The solution has a user friendly interface."
"It optimizes the process for cloud structure."
"Their technical support is great; we had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner, and overall we are satisfied."
"With the help of vCloud Director, we have been able to provide really good multi-tenanted services, making the best use of existing hardware and investments, but reducing our overall CapEx very heavily."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"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."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. It also needs a more simplified installation because the process is a little bit complicated."
"The product installation process could be easier for new users as well."
"Initially, I would rate the stability a three out of ten because we faced some complex stability issues initially."
"Metering is one of the areas where I find Cloud Director leaves much to be desired."
"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."
"It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security."
"Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions."
"There are too many errors, it could be more stable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

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Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.