OpenNebula Concepts on

OpenNebula Overview

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to OpenNebula, the open source Cloud & Edge Computing Platform bringing real freedom to your Enterprise Cloud 🚀

This page provides a high-level overview of the OpenNebula cloud model, architecture, and components. To familiarize yourself with OpenNebula and build an evaluation environment or quickly start a production environment, we strongly recommend you follow the tutorials in our Getting Started Guides. For a description of the steps needed to build a production environment, please refer to Cloud Architecture Design.

Why OpenNebula? - Feature Comparison

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Organizations today are looking for flexible, open solutions to simplify their IT infrastructure, consolidate workloads, and build scalable private, hybrid, and edge clouds. By adopting a unified cloud management and virtualization platform, they can reduce operational complexity, lower costs (TCO), and gain complete control over their digital infrastructure.

OpenNebula is a mature, open platform that provides complete cloud and virtualization management—combining in a single and a lightweight solution all the capabilities of a hypervisor manager such as VMware vSphere®, a cloud orchestrator such as Nutanix Cloud Platform®, as well as a hybrid/edge enabler.

Key Features

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OpenNebula offers a simple but feature-rich and flexible solution to build and manage data center virtualization and enterprise clouds. This page provides a summary of its key features**.

To learn more about the infrastructure platforms and services supported in each version of OpenNebula, please refer to the Platform Notes for each version.

For high-level overviews and in-depth technical guides, please refer to OpenNebula’s White Papers.

Platform Architecture and Management

Centralized Control Plane

OpenNebula provides a unified and centralized control plane for the complete management, monitoring, and automation of virtual and cloud resources across the infrastructure.

Multi-tenancy Models and User Roles

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a small installation with a few Hosts you can use OpenNebula without giving much thought to infrastructure partitioning and provisioning. However, for medium and large-scale deployments you will probably want to provide some level of isolation and structure. OpenNebula offers a flexible and powerful cloud provisioning model based on Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) that enables an integrated, comprehensive framework to dynamically provision the infrastructure resources in large multi-datacenter and multi-cloud environments to different customers, business units, or groups. Another key management task in an OpenNebula Infrastructure environment involves determining who can use the cloud interfaces and what tasks those users are authorized to perform. This White Paper is meant for cloud architects, builders, and administrators, to help them understand the OpenNebula models for managing and provisioning virtual resources, and default user roles in OpenNebula.

OpenNebula Screencasts and Tutorials

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Master OpenNebula at your own pace with our library of practical tutorials and screencasts. Check the OpenNebula Screencast Catalog on the website for more tutorials, use case demonstrations and the latest screencast updates.

Introduction and Getting Started

Virtual Machines

Virtual Networks

Storage and Backup

Secure Multi-Tenancy

High Availability and Resources

VMware Migration

Kubernetes

Hybrid Cloud

AI Factories

Use Cases

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User Stories

OpenNebula is used to implement different types of cloud deployments, from clouds tuned to address the demands of a niche market to clouds optimized to manage the virtualized resources in the data center. We are constantly collecting inspiring user stories from organizations using OpenNebula and interested in sharing their experience with the rest of the OpenNebula Community.

Note

Browse user stories from organizations using OpenNebula here.

Case Studies

Learn more from OpenNebula users about how they are putting OpenNebula to work! See how its flexibility and simplicity, its true hybrid and edge capabilities, along with its compatibility with other open source platforms and third-party technologies such as Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform make it the ideal versatile solution for complex environments, no matter what the industry may be.