Last month, we attended MSP Global 2024 near Barcelona, Spain as our first foray to get in front of a huge Cloud Service Provider community who have been majorly affected by VMware’s products and services, since the acquisition by Broadcom last year.

To track back a bit, earlier this year VMware announced that “Effective April 30, 2024, the ability to transact as a VMware Cloud Services Provider, under the VMware Partner Connect Program, will come to an end.” Perhaps the CSP Community in VMware wasn’t as large as their Enterprise arm, but many of these service providers heavily relied on tools such as VMware Cloud Director, to act as a multi-tenant portal for their end users.

Broadcom decided to replace this previously-open partner program with an invite-only “Broadcom Advantage Partner Program” with reports that only partners spending hundreds of thousands of USD of VMware products are accepted.

This combined with Broadcom VMware’s transition to remove pretty much all proprietary licensing and move almost everything to a per-core-per-year subscription basis, on a set of completely different billable metrics than the old VMware cloud service provider programs (utilized virtual RAM versus physical CPU cores) has caused MSPs to be looking into alternatives.

OpenNebula can be a great alternative to migrate to for VMware service providers who have built their businesses around VMware Cloud Director – we offer a familiar multi-tenant self-service portal, a brand-new, modern, UX-first graphical user interface and all the tools that service providers need to migrate their VMs from VMware and manage them using OpenNebula’s KVM orchestration tool.

Let’s take a look at a couple of these features in more detail.

Brand New, Modern, Intuitive UI

In the latest version of OpenNebula, we’ve rebuilt Sunstone, our web interface, from the ground up. It’s now neck-and-neck with the old version in terms of features, but with a fresh, modern look.

From now on, it will be the go-to interface for all new OpenNebula clouds. Whether you’re an administrator or an end user we think you’ll appreciate the breath of fresh air – and we’d love to hear your feedback!

Hardware, Operating System and Architecture Agnostic

There is no vendor lock-in with OpenNebula: whether you use a local storage solution, an external hardware SAN or a proprietary software-defined storage solution, you will not have issues migrating to OpenNebula. Our platform supports many different storage configurations out of the box, as well as integrations with enterprise-grade software-defined storage solutions such as Linstor and StorPool.

OpenNebula supports many different types of operating systems and no requirements of specific hardware vendors at all, making it a frictionless task to migrate your existing VMware estate into OpenNebula, without having to procure hardware for an entire new cloud solution.

Customizable Multi-Tenancy Options

As OpenNebula is known as a customizable, extensible cloud management platform, it can be used for a multitude of use cases. This includes feature sets around ACLs (access control lists), VDCs (virtual data centers), and general authentication management via Users and Groups, which allows you to configure multi-tenancy in exactly the way you need for your customers.

For those familiar with VMware Cloud Director, you can provide your users a very similar experience using OpenNebula by creating virtually-isolated environments (or Organisations as they are known in VCD) for your end users. Your users then can only access the resources you provide them by utilizing Groups and Quotas, as well as allowing them to self-serve deploy resources such as virtual machines and networks (Organisation networks in VCD).

Billing and Invoicing

OpenNebula comes included with a showback system as standard, allowing you to define pricing for almost any resource based on what your users need to consume. OpenNebula performs all of the calculations and provides the reporting capabilities, either through the Sunstone user interface, or exportable via API.

For users with an OpenNebula Enterprise Edition subscription, you have access to a module for WHMCS, a popular third party product for managed service providers, that allows your customers to purchase packages of resources and automatically create user accounts, track usage, invoice and charge.

Free Migrations from VMware

For a limited period of time, we are offering free* migration services from your existing VMware environment into new OpenNebula clouds. OpenNebula have developed a solution to migrate virtual resources from vCenter into OpenNebula which you can download here.

OneSwap is a command line tool that has been designed to simplify the entire migration process. The CLI tool will connect to your existing vCenter server and list all of your Datacenters, Clusters and Virtual Machines—you can then select each virtual machine by name and the tool will automatically kick off the migration process. Read more about our OneSwap tool in our launch blog post.

If you are ready to take the plunge and look into VMware alternatives, we would happily talk about your use case and provide an in-depth product demonstration to show how OpenNebula can fit your needs.

We offer simple ‘per-managed host’ annual subscriptions to the Enterprise Edition of OpenNebula which come with features packed with additional utilities and access to SLA-based Enterprise support services. Let’s talk today!

*Terms apply