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 6.6% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 6.0% 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

3,177 Views
3,082 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 69 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,727 Views
2,291 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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

Download the complete report

Helped 865,384 peers since 2012

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 August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.6%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.0%, down from 7.5% 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.

Read full review

KuldeepSingh4

Technical Solution Architect at HCLSoftware

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.

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

"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."

"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 solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

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

"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."

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

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

More OpenNebula pros

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."

"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."

"The stability of the product is better than just 'good.'"

"The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director for me is its user-friendly UI, which is much easier compared to other platforms."

"vCloud Director is a stable solution."

"The most valuable features are the UI, the interface, and accessibility."

"We use the solution to connect clouds to different clouds."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

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

"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 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."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"They should add more features like object storage."

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

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

More OpenNebula cons

"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."

"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."

"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."

"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."

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

"The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive."

"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."

"VMware should simplify the whole solution as it comprises many different components, making management hard."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

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

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"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."

"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 solution is open source so is free."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."

"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."

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

"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"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."

"This is an expensive solution."

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

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

20%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

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 47% 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 5% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Automation 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

August 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

March 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our OpenNebula vs. VMware Cloud Director report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.