OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

OpenNebula and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while VMware is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8. OpenNebula holds a 6.8% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,157 Views
1,697 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 68 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,334 Views
1,543 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and OpenNebula operate in the cloud infrastructure platform market, with VMware Cloud Director being more suited for enterprise-level deployments due to its comprehensive service offerings, scalability, and advanced features. OpenNebula, on the other hand, appeals to smaller operations because of its open-source nature and ease of use.

Features: VMware Cloud Director is known for extensive cloud service offerings, multi-tenancy, and integration abilities with VMware’s suite, making it robust for enterprise use. OpenNebula is appreciated for its lightweight nature, simple deployment, and support for multiple hypervisors, offering flexibility as a cloud management platform.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could enhance its public cloud integration, simplify user experiences, and improve HTML5 support. Users seek better alignment with AWS or Azure. OpenNebula requires stronger community support, better template management capabilities, and advanced cloud features to compete effectively with rivals.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director offers flexible deployment options across various cloud environments, though setup can be complex. Its customer support receives mixed reviews concerning timeliness. Conversely, OpenNebula is praised for straightforward deployment in on-premises setups and customer service simplicity.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director's high costs may not suit budget-constrained projects, although its benefits can lead to substantial ROI over time due to enhanced service delivery. OpenNebula, with its cost-effective approach, especially for open-source users, presents an attractive pricing model, delivering quick ROI through low initial investments and operational savings.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

July 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

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

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.8%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.3%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

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.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure

The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

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

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

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

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

"It is quite easy to deploy."

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

More OpenNebula pros

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

"The tool is very stable."

"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."

"vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure."

"The most valuable features are the multi-tenancy and multi-site configuration."

"We can run it on self-hosted systems, and we are happy with the stability of vCloud Director."

"The stability is rock solid."

"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

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

"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."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."

"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 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."

More OpenNebula cons

"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."

"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."

"This is very simple in OpenShift. We are happy with vCloud in terms of the virtualization but not for redundancy and distribution."

"The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated."

"There didn't seem to be any type of integrated path on how to do the initial setup. There seemed to be different bits of paperwork or instructions available from various places. We always had to go looking for what to do next."

"The tool needs to add more features to improve the console."

"The integration between components could be improved."

"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

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."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

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

"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."

"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."

"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."

"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."

"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 49% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 12% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 4% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 22% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 20% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

June 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

March 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

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vCloud Director

Overview

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.

OpenNebula

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

VMware

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.

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

July 2025

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director

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