The OpenNebula team has just returned from Boston, USA, where we were exhibiting at the Red Hat Summit for the first time.

While the big announcement in the Red Hat ecosystem was the launch of RHEL version 10, even Red Hat themselves made under-the-cuff comments about how enterprise virtualization users had received multiple price increases this year—clearly a discrete way of referring to the issues within Broadcom VMware since their acquisition 18 months ago.

And that’s exactly why we attended the Summit this year—thousands of attendees at an enterprise IT event, many of whom have been on the receiving end of the VMware price hikes. And with the number of attendees we had at our booth, it’s very clear that we’re still in the early days of organizations looking to migrate away from VMware. Many of the delegates also confirmed to us that their main reason for attending the Summit was to look for open source alternatives, and that our messaging around VMware brought them to our booth.

Over the course of the three exhibition days at the Red Hat Summit, the OpenNebula team spoke with hundreds of interested organizations, most of which were either just starting their journey to explore VMware alternatives or already evaluating other cloud management platforms. We even spoke to prospects who were currently in the process of evaluating OpenNebula—and it’s always great to meet up in person

The story hasn’t changed much in the past year—the uncertainty in the VMware ecosystem is still the number one concern for almost everyone we speak to. The Red Hat Summit came at an opportune time for OpenNebula—just as we released our beta for version 7.0, which comes packed with features and functionality requested by our users and customers. In the next few weeks, version 7.0 will become generally available, and everyone will have access to our own improved version of DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), integrations with enterprise ecosystems such as Veeam and NetApp, new and improved storage options, OVA support, and much more. Check out our beta announcement—it includes a recent overview of version 7.0 for more information.

During the Summit there were tons of sessions on everything in the Red Hat ecosystem—from the core operating system all the way to development and automation tools such as Ansible. But the event wasn’t all learning sessions—the conclusion of the event was held at Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox! It was a great networking event, given the social aspect of a baseball game, and it was clearly popular with attendees, judging by the number of “red hats” in the crowd during Thursday evening’s game against the New York Mets—one of the most intriguing rivalries in Major League Baseball.

Stay tuned for some deeper dives on the new functionality coming in OpenNebula 7.0 over the coming weeks and months. We’re now preparing demos for these upcoming features, so be sure to reach out if you’re one of the many organizations looking to migrate from VMware to OpenNebula—or looking for an enterprise-ready cloud management solution.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth during the Red Hat Summit, and we hope to see you there next year!