**OpenNebula** is an open source cloud management platform that provides IaaS orchestration — similar to [[OpenStack]] but with significantly fewer moving parts and lower operational complexity. It is the pragmatist's choice when you want a production-grade private cloud without a dedicated platform engineering team. --- ### First Principle: Simplicity is a feature. The best architecture is the one your team can actually operate. OpenStack is powerful but notoriously complex. OpenNebula trades some feature breadth for dramatic operational simplicity. A small team of two or three engineers can run a production OpenNebula deployment serving hundreds of tenants. --- ### Key Considerations - **Architecture**: A single frontend node and multiple KVM-based host nodes. Far simpler than OpenStack's dozen-plus services. - **Hypervisor Support**: [[KVM]] is the primary target. Also supports VMware vSphere and LXC containers. - **Networking**: Supports [[Open vSwitch (OVS)]], Linux bridges, and 802.1Q VLANs. Less feature-rich than [[OVN]] but easier to configure. - **Edge & Hybrid**: Particularly strong for edge deployments and hybrid cloud scenarios where you're managing multiple remote sites with limited operations staff. - **vs OpenStack**: [[OpenStack]] wins on features, ecosystem, and community size. OpenNebula wins on operational simplicity and total cost of ownership for smaller deployments. --- ### How It Fits ``` [[MAAS]] or manual bare metal → OpenNebula (IaaS orchestration) → [[KVM]] / [[libvirt]] (compute) → [[Ceph]] or local storage + [[Open vSwitch (OVS)]] ``` [[OpenStack]] | [[KVM]] | [[Ceph]] | [[Open vSwitch (OVS)]] | [[Open Source Hyperscaler MoC]]