C12G Labs has just announced the results of a survey to determine the main building blocks that constitute the existing OpenNebula clouds. The results of this survey were collected during the 2nd and 3rd quarter of 2012 from the OpenNebula open source cloud management platform community with regards to the type of cloud deployment and its main architectural components. The aim of the survey is to acquire information in order to improve the support for the most demanded infrastructure platforms and deployments.

Since the foundation of the open-source project in November 2007, OpenNebula has been downloaded more than 80,000 times from the project site. However, the number of downloads is much higher because the code can be also downloaded from the software repository and from the official repository of the main Linux distributions. Moreover, several commercial and open-source distributions use OpenNebula as an embedded cloud management platform.

Although more than 2,500 users took part of the survey, just 820 reported to have an OpenNebula cloud up and running, and hence we have only included them in the analysis.

Regarding the use of OpenNebula, the Survey shows that 43% of the deployments are in industry and 17% in research centers. 79% of the respondents use OpenNebula to build a private cloud and 21% use OpenNebula to offer public services. When asked about the type of workload, 58% said that they use OpenNebula for running non-critical environments while 42% use OpenNebula for running production workloads.

Regarding the building blocks of the cloud, KVM at 42% and VMware at 27% are the dominant hypervisors, and Ubuntu at 31% and CentOS at 26% are the most widely used linux distributions for OpenNebula clouds. There is no clear preferred choice for the storage back-end, distributed file systems are used by 38% of the deployments, local host storage by 34% and block-based solutions by 23%. Finally, 51% of the OpenNebula deployments are medium size with a number of physical servers between 10 and 100, and a 13% of the deployments have more 500 physical nodes.

The full results can be seen at http://www.c12g.com/survey