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Cisco UCS Director vs OpenNebula 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

Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
26th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpenNebula1.5%
Cisco UCS Director1.6%
Other96.9%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OR
Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless
We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"As usual, the technical support from Cisco is amazing."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"I would recommend this solution to others because it simplifies a lot of tasks via orchestration."
"The technical support for this solution is very good, at least in our region."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"Without UCS Director it wouldn't be possible for us to go from receiving shipments at a data center to having systems live in production in a matter of days, or sometimes hours, instead of waiting weeks."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
 

Cons

"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved because as it is now, you cannot scale the storage alone. Rather, you have to scale the storage and the compute together."
"The user interface could use improvement."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"I would like to see more flexibility when it comes to managing other stacks, like VMware virtualization."
"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS Director."
"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 storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"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."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"The cost of this solution is significant."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?
Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.