Executive Summary

The results of this survey were collected during July and August of 2014 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 200,000 times from the project site (120,000 times since our last survey in September 2012), not including other software repositories or third-party distributions.

Regarding the use of OpenNebula, the Survey shows that 42% of the deployments are in Industry and 14% in Research Centers. 74% of the organizations are in Europe, Russia or USA. 88% of the respondents use OpenNebula to build a private cloud. When asked about the type of workload, 62% said that they use OpenNebula for running production workloads.

Regarding the size of the clouds, 10% of the deployments have more 500 physical nodes. 44% of the deployments consist of more than one OpenNebula zone and 4% are running more than 10 zones. One of the companies reported a workload of 200,000 VMs. Among the advanced components offered by OpenNebula, High Availability, with 67%, is the most widely used or planned to use, which is closely aligned with the top usage of OpenNebula in production environments.

Regarding the building blocks of the cloud, KVM at 48% and VMware at 30% are the dominant hypervisors, and CentOS at 46% and Ubuntu at 36% are the most widely used linux distributions for OpenNebula clouds. The preferred choices for the storage back-ends are shared FS and SSH with a 52% and 36% ratio respectively. The most widely used Configuration Management Systems are Puppet and Ansible with a 37% and 14% respectively. Regarding networking, most of the deployments, a 49%, use the Standard Linux Bridge for network configuration, 38% use Open vSwitch, and 30% use 802.1Q.

In comparison to the previous survey findings in 2012, the relevant changes are that CentOS has displaced Ubuntu as the most widely linux distribution to build OpenNebula clouds, and a growth in the number of production deployments from 42% to 62% and in the number of public clouds that has doubled from 21% to 40%.

Although more than 2,000 users took part of the survey, we have only included in the analysis those respondents using OpenNebula 4.x (latest series) and who we deem reliable because they have provided identification details that allow us to verify the answers of the survey. This is important given that our main aim is to have accurate and useful information about OpenNebula deployments.

Last, but not least, when asked about what you like most about OpenNebula, most users, a 76%, answered because of its simplicity, and 69% and 65% answered because of its flexibility and openness. These results are aligned with our our mission — to become the simplest cloud enabling platform — and our purpose — to bring simplicity to the private and hybrid enterprise cloud. OpenNebula exists to help companies build simple, cost-effective, reliable, open enterprise clouds on existing IT infrastructure.

BIG THANKS to all the organizations that have contributed to the survey!

A. About the Organization

42% of the respondents indicated that they work for industry, while 14% work for research centers.

Type of Organization

54% of the deployments are in Europe and Russia. This means a small increase compared with previous survey where the number of deployments in Europe and Russia was 49%. 80% of the respondents are located in Europe, Russia, North America, China, Japan or Korea.

63% of the organizations are small companies with fewer than 100 employees, and only 5% has more than 10,000 employees.

B. About the Cloud

88% of the respondents are running a private cloud for internal operations, while 40% are running a public cloud to offer utility services. Compared with 2012, the number of public clouds has doubled from 21%. This is aligned with the quickly growing number of hosting companies that are adopting OpenNebula to offer cloud services.

76% of the respondents are running a non-critical environment or peripheral installations for running testing or development applications, while 62% are using the cloud for running production workloads. The number of production deployments has grown from 42% in 2012.

The number of users in most of the clouds, a 71%, is fewer than 100. Many of these deployments use OpenNebula as virtual data center infrastructure manager and not as a cloud provisioning platform.

C. About the Cloud Architecture

52% of the OpenNebula deployments have more than 10 nodes, and 10% of the deployments have more than 500 physical nodes. The number of very large-scale deployments has slightly fallen from 13% achieved in 2012.

44% of the deployments consist of more than one OpenNebula zone, and 4% are running more than 10 zones.

KVM at 48% and VMware at 28% are the most widely used hypervisors. Next one is Xen at 11%. Hyper-V and Xen Cloud Platform usage has fallen from a 11% in 2012 to a 4%, mostly because these two hypervisors are not supported by the OpenNebula distribution. They can be used through community plugins.

52% of the OpenNebula deployments use a shared file system; 36% of users use the ssh datastore; 30% use VMware FS; and 42% of the users use a block device architecture based on LVM or iSCSI. GlusterFS and Ceph are used by 18% and 17% of the organizations respectively.

Most of the deployments, a 49%, use the Standard Linux Bridge for network configuration; 38% uses Open vSwitch; and 30% uses 802.1Q.

92% of the clouds use the monitoring system provided by OpenNebula, and 37% use a third-party monitoring system.

Regarding authentication, most of the organizations, a 65%, are using the built-in user/password system, while SSH and LDAP, with 43% and 27%, are the more popular external authentication systems.

CentOS at 46% and Ubuntu at 36% are the most widely used linux distributions for building OpenNebula clouds. In the previous survey in 2012, Ubuntu was the most widely used with a 31%. Notice that in this last survey we allowed respondents to select more than one operating system.

Puppet is used by 37% of the OpenNebula users. 37% have reported that they do not use any Configuration Management Systems (CMS) as the existing OpenNebula contextualization system and cloud-init support meet their needs. Ansible ,with a 14%, is the next popular CMS within the OpenNebula community.

Among the advanced components offered by OpenNebula, High Availability, with a 67%, is the most widely used or planned to use. Flow multi-VM and DC federation are the next features with a 46%.

D. Why OpenNebula

Basically OpenNebula is used for its simplicity, flexibility, and openness.