We’re excited to share the highlights from the final OpenNebula TechDay of the year, held at the BIT offices in Ede, the Netherlands. This event was dedicated to how OpenNebula can be a great replacement for those who have been feeling the brunt of VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom.

Located just one hour outside of the capital, the event consisted of attendees from all over the Benelux region, especially from cities such as Utrecht and Amsterdam. Many of them were facing similar challenges that we hear about all of the time—pricing changes, degradation of support and services, and huge uncertainty for those who are still utilising VMware.

Opening Session

The event began with a welcome to all attendees and an introduction to OpenNebula as both a business and its impressive history. We also covered the key advantages and benefits that OpenNebula offers to VMware customers.

The session included a timeline of everything that has happened in the VMware ecosystem, highlighting how OpenNebula is bridging the gap between the huge price increases VMware users have been facing. We also offered an overview of what the future could hold.

A snapshot of some of the impressive existing customers already using OpenNebula—like Nintendo, Activision, Telefónica—fascinated the audience., Additionally, case studies of users migrating from VMware to OpenNebula, such as Beeks (featured in The Register), garnered strong interest.

Live Demo

One of TechDay’s key moments was the live demo showcasing OpenNebula as a drop-in replacement for VMware, including seamless migration capabilities using OpenNebula OneSwap.

The first demo gave an overview of the OpenNebula platform, highlighting virtual machine management, multi-tenancy aspects, virtual data centers, and other features. Advanced functionalities, such as multi-VM applications, were also covered.

The demo prompted many questions around the use of OneProvision, to quickly spin up remote resources, as well as expanding existing on premise infrastructure in an easy and automated way. The autoscaling functionality when using Services within OpenNebula was also a popular topic.

The second demo involved migrating a Windows VM from VMware to OpenNebula. The audience was impressed by the ease and speed of the migration.

Success Stories and Use Cases

After the coffee break, we heard from some of our partners.

Yusuf Yildiz, Solutions Architect at LINBIT, presented how well OpenNebula and LINBIT work together. He mentioned that OpenNebula and LINBIT are a perfect replacement for VMware users utilising vSAN.

Yusuf explained the impressive features, functionality and architecture of the LINBIT’s Software Defined Storage solution.

“LINBIT is a swiss army knife for your storage solution.” – Yusuf Yildiz, Solutions Architect at LINBIT

According to Yusuf, it addresses issues common with other storage vendors, such as lack of scalability, resilience, support, and forced vendor lock-in. Together with OpenNebula they provide a full end-to-end compute orchestration and storage solution.

LINBIT also showcased a real-world use case of an OpenNebula + LINSTOR customer. The audience was amazed to know that the entire solution encompassed over 340 hypervisor nodes, utilizing 7.6PiB of total storage and included a single VM with a 21TiB disk. This is incredibly impressive given the limitations that VMware’s software defined storage solution, vSAN, enforces on their users.

The final partner session was from Stefan Kooman, Senior Unix/Linux Engineer at BIT, who discussed data sovereignty, public cloud risks, and the path to decentralization. It was especially interesting to hear how in recent years large hyperscalers are approaching total domination over all kinds of internet services.

Stefan explained how a lot of smaller scale infrastructure is at risk, due to the methods that hyperscalers have been implementing—essentially centralizing the internet so it suits them.

He shared a case study of how centralizing infrastructure can be dangerous—citing the example of a Dutch bank that went bankrupt due to sanctions from hyperscalers, which prevented the bank from accessing critical resources like their emails.

Both sessions provided great real-world examples and use cases of why using OpenNebula, and disconnecting from the hyperscalers, can help futureproof and ensure you keep control over your cloud infrastructure.

Future Outlook

To finish up our final TechDay of the year, Alberto Picón from OpenNebula Systems presented some of the new and upcoming functionality. The audience was excited to see that next year OpenNebula will be releasing key features, such as alternatives to VMware’s Dynamic Resource Scheduling, integrations with Veeam backup, and improvements to OpenNebula’s storage options.

Finally, our partners at BIT took the TechDay attendees on a tour of their impressive data center. 

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