Over the past few months, we’ve seen unprecedented demand from users looking to migrate away from VMware, following Broadcom’s acquisition back in November 2023. This increased interest has led to a 300% rise in inbound qualified opportunities over the past 12 months compared to the previous year. The vast majority of these are from companies looking to migrate from VMware, with a highlight in Q4 2024, seeing over 7x more engagement than the previous year.

This attention has spurred not just from those casually looking at alternatives, but also due to some of the tools we’ve released, such as OneSwap – a tool to make migrating from VMware to OpenNebula easy and efficient. This really entices people in, as migrating away from VMware to OpenNebula is not as daunting as it might seem at first glance.

While these numbers speak for themselves, migration to a different cloud management platform is rarely a quick decision. We’ve been working closely with our users to understand the most sought-after features and functionality from both our existing customers and those who are interested in migrating to OpenNebula.

With that in mind, we want to take the opportunity to give some sneak peaks of some of the upcoming features we’re adding to OpenNebula in our upcoming major release, OpenNebula 7.0.

Distributed Resource Scheduler

From our initial feedback the most requested functionality is an equivalent to VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). DRS is some really great technology which allows VMware environments to utilize VMware vMotion to automatically load balance virtual machines and distribute them over the cluster based on resource usage.

Watch this space for a full deep-dive on this feature, however rest assured that it’s on its way to OpenNebula, and you’ll soon be able to get this DRS-like functionality inside your OpenNebula cloud.

Integrations with Backup and Storage Vendors

As OpenNebula is fully vendor-agnostic, we never want to enforce hardware or software vendor requirements on our users. In preparation for OpenNebula 7.0, we’ve been working with some of the top backup and storage vendors to offer native integrations.

Backup Vendors

On the backup front, we’re looking into integrations with the two most in-demand vendors from our user base: Veeam and Commvault. While there are ways to work with these vendors by utilizing agent-based backups, both Veeam and Commvault have built awesome products allowing their customers to directly connect into cloud platforms and initiate backups and restores from their own consoles.

Our users have indicated en-mass that they want this to work with OpenNebula, and we’re collaborating with these vendors to bring this to reality utilizing existing KVM functionality that exist within both Veeam and Commvault.

Storage Vendors

On the storage front, while it’s possible to utilize any SAN vendor with OpenNebula through either NFS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel, there can be limitations due to the Linux filesystem when using LVM.

We’re working on integrations with some specific vendors – starting with Pure Storage and NetApp – the SAN vendors that our feedback has indicated are the most popular with our users. This will mean that rather than using iSCSI via LVM, OpenNebula will be able to manage the block device directly and therefore it can be utilized in a much more native way.

While we’re starting with NetApp and Pure Storage, we’re also getting strong demand for other vendors as well, such as Dell and HPE, and we hope to announce support for additional vendors in upcoming releases.

In the meantime, we’re also working on alleviating some of the limitations of LVM to enable full snapshotting, live-migration, and fault tolerance functionality when using shared storage devices via iSCSI and Fibre Channel in OpenNebula. Stay tuned for further updates on this.

Other Features and Functionality

While the above are the main new showcase functionalities, we’re also working on some smaller but highly requested items.

We’ll be adding the ability to upload and utilize Open Virtual Appliances (OVAs) within OpenNebula. In the background, we’ll extract and convert the OVA to formats that OpenNebula can handle, like qcow2 disk images. Though there are ways of doing this manually outside of OpenNebula today, we’re making this simple and straightforward to utilize your existing OVAs in your OpenNebula cloud environment.

Another in-demand feature is around cross-cluster migrations – something that those that are migrating from VMware environments will be very used to. While the architecture of OpenNebula clusters is slightly different to VMware clusters, whereas OpenNebula clusters are not as restrictive, we still understand that the ability to migrate virtual machine workloads between different clusters is important to have. Keep an eye on our upcoming 7.0 release for further information.

Finally, we’ve made significant improvements to the VNC console you use to manage virtual machines, including major updates to Windows support, better performance with preset ‘profiles’ for Windows VMs, and simplification around installing and configuring through our OneDeploy tool – a set of Ansible playbooks we’ve developed to make it simple and straightforward to deploy, configure and grow your cloud platform running on OpenNebula.

Conclusion

This summarizes just a few of the new features and integrations we are bringing to our users with OpenNebula 7.0 that will be released in April 2025. This is not where it ends though – we’re already planning and ideating on what will come next after these, and we’d love to get your feedback.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing a survey to hear from our customers, partners, users, and community to help us build the features and functionality that you need in a cloud management platform.

Curious about what else is coming in OpenNebula 7.0? Stay updated and be part of the evolution — join the conversation and share your thoughts with us!