​CloudFest 2025 has come to a close, marking another successful year of collaboration and innovation within the cloud computing community. The OpenNebula team was excited to connect with partners, customers, and fellow cloud enthusiasts at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany, from March 17-20. This year’s theme, The Human Edge: Finding Your Place in an AI World, explored how cloud technologies, automation, and AI-driven solutions can work alongside human expertise to drive business success.

Key Trends and Insights from CloudFest 2025

CloudFest 2025 highlighted some of the most important trends and discussions shaping the future of cloud computing. Here are the key takeaways:

AI-Driven Optimization and Cloud Automation

AI is playing a central role in shaping the future of cloud operations, particularly as businesses look to build private and hybrid clouds tailored for AI training and inference. At CloudFest, there was a clear emphasis on how organizations can balance AI-driven automation with human oversight to optimize cloud environments. OpenNebula supports AI workloads by integrating high-performance hardware support and multi-tenancy features.

Key benefits include:

• Robust Multi-Tenancy: Secure resource sharing across teams while efficiently leveraging GPU acceleration.
• High-Performance Hardware Access: Seamless support for SR-IOV and PCI passthrough, optimizing GPU-intensive workloads.
• True As-a-Service Model: Effortlessly manage on-premise and multi-cloud hybrid AI deployments.

Open Source and Vendor Neutral Solutions

A significant trend we observed at CloudFest was the continued demand from organizations looking to move away from VMware. As companies seek more flexible and cost-effective cloud management solutions, many are turning to open source alternatives. OpenNebula stood out as a powerful, open source option, offering greater control, flexibility, and freedom from vendor lock-in, making it an attractive choice for those seeking to break free from proprietary cloud platforms.

A lot of the upcoming features in OpenNebula 7.0 are aimed at organizations looking to move away from VMware—check out our recent webinar where we provide an overview of all new functionality and improvements. Some of the key ones include:

• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) equivalent: Bringing VMware DRS-like functionality to OpenNebula for automatic load balancing and resource distribution.
• Enhanced backup and storage integrations: Native integrations with top backup vendors like Veeam and Commvault, and storage integrations with Pure Storage and NetApp for improved cloud management.
• Cross-cluster migrations: Enabling virtual machine workload migration across different clusters, an important feature for users transitioning from VMware environments.

Hybrid Cloud: Bridging the Gap

Hybrid cloud has become the dominant model for many organizations. CloudFest highlighted both the challenges and opportunities of hybrid cloud deployments, including managing workloads across diverse environments and ensuring seamless integration. OpenNebula’s ability to unify management across on-premises, public cloud, and edge resources resonated strongly with attendees, showcasing the need for solutions that simplify hybrid cloud operations and enable true workload portability. In OpenNebula 7.0, we’re revamping OneProvision with improvements and additional features, including a brand new name, OneForm, as well as new providers such as Scaleaway and i3d.

Presentation Highlights

On March 20, Jim Freeman, Technical Product Manager, presented a session on how OpenNebula can serve as a viable alternative to VMware infrastructure. Jim provided attendees with an in-depth overview of OpenNebula’s key features and capabilities. Additionally, he offered a preview of upcoming features and functionalities in our next release, incorporating feedback from customers who have successfully migrated to OpenNebula. Highlights include support for Veeam backups, snapshot management with LVM datastores, and expanded SAN vendor compatibility.

Looking Ahead

CloudFest 2025 provided valuable insights into the evolving needs of the cloud market. OpenNebula Systems remains committed to addressing these needs with a flexible, open, and sustainable cloud management platform. We are excited to continue collaborating with our community and partners to help organizations build the cloud infrastructure they need to succeed.

See you at CloudFest 2026!