Executive Interview: OpenNebula CEO on Cloud Shifts Post-Broadcom Deal

Interview Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems

HostingJournalist sat down with Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems, to discuss how VMware’s recent acquisition by Broadcom has shifted market dynamics, sparking increased interest in open-source cloud solutions. Mr. Llorente shares insights on OpenNebula’s strategic approach to address this trend and how they aim to meet the growing demand for alternatives.

“VMware has caused significant disruption in the cloud technology market, beginning with its acquisition by Broadcom and followed by strategic changes that have impacted contractual terms, licensing models, and pricing policies,” said Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente. “One of the most notable shifts has been VMware’s decision to prioritize its top-tier customers, leaving many mid-sized and smaller companies – once a large segment of its customer and partner base – seeking alternative solutions. According to Gartner, changes in VMware’s licensing and pricing structures have resulted in deployment costs increasing by 2 to 3 times. This shift has been especially challenging for companies that have relied heavily on VMware, particularly cloud service providers, who have experienced price hikes of up to tenfold.”

“The acquisition has raised concerns about vendor lock-in, further driving interest in open source alternatives for hybrid-cloud solutions. Companies now want to regain control over the technology they deploy in their strategic environments, and demand greater control and transparency. Since the release of its first version in March 2008, OpenNebula has established itself as a leading open source software solution for cloud infrastructure management, with over 5,000 deployments and notable clients across various sectors. Success stories include FinTech companies like MX, gaming companies such as EveryMatrix, cloud service providers like Dustin, and online retailers like CEWE. These organizations use OpenNebula for large-scale cloud deployments, federations of globally distributed clouds, and cloud instances exceeding 2,000 hosts.”

“OpenNebula streamlines the transition from VMware to the KVM hypervisor by offering innovative features and a straightforward migration process that facilitates the deployment of hybrid cloud infrastructures, all while giving users full control over their environments.”

Can you explain how exactly OpenNebula’s platform facilitates a smooth transition for businesses moving from VMware to a more flexible, open source cloud management solution?

“Migrating from VMware’s infrastructure to an open KVM-based infrastructure can vary in complexity depending on the scale and nature of the environment. For many companies, such migrations can be challenging, particularly when critical services must remain uninterrupted. To address these challenges, we introduced OneSwap, a user-friendly command-line tool that simplifies and automates virtual machine migration from vCenter Server to OpenNebula Cloud. Companies like EncoreTech have reported a 97% success rate in automated VM migrations using OneSwap, with only 3% of VMs requiring manual intervention.”

“Additionally, we have launched a VMware Migration Service to assist companies in planning and executing a migration strategy from VMware to OpenNebula. This service ensures a smooth transition with minimal disruption to business operations and provides IT teams with the expertise needed to migrate virtual machines from ESXi to KVM-based OpenNebula, all according to a validated migration plan.”

Supported by the EU’s €2.6 billion IPCEI-CIS project, OpenNebula is promoting digital sovereignty in Europe. How exactly does OpenNebula contribute to promoting cloud neutrality and reducing dependence on non-EU providers?

“Our main goal at IPCEI-CIS is to introduce neutrality, freedom of choice, and portability into the cloud market, creating a more level playing field and enhancing the competitiveness of providers beyond the dominant big three. OpenNebula is focused on coordinating and facilitating the development of a neutral software cloud-edge management platform that enables the on-demand use of infrastructure resources from diverse HPC, cloud, edge and 5G providers, tailored to the dynamic needs of applications.”

“This platform will serve both application and service providers, as well as infrastructure providers, allowing for the deployment of innovative business models. The objective is to shift the current trend, empowering small and medium-sized providers to expand their market share. Achieving this will also rely on factors such as the growing demand for edge processing and the speed of new edge node deployments.”

How is OpenNebula’s role in the IPCEI-CIS project helping to shape the future of cloud infrastructure in Europe, and what milestones have been achieved so far?

“IPCEI-CIS involves more than 100 European companies from 11 member states, including prominent industry players such as Telefónica, Telecom Italia, SAP, Amadeus, Orange, Siemens, Fincantieri, and Deutsche Telekom. A project of this scale and budget, with such a considerable number of companies involved, naturally requires a significant startup period to get off the ground. Following an agile methodology, the definition of the architecture for the first version of the integrated IPCEI-CIS platform is currently being finalized, with the goal of delivering an initial version and demonstrating its functionality before the end of the year. As for OpenNebula, by the end of the year, we will release the first version of our next-generation software, which will incorporate innovations in artificial intelligence, automation, confidential computing, and multi-provider management.”

OpenNebula has facilitated large-scale migrations from VMware to open source for companies like EveryMatrix and CEWE. What specific benefits can these companies gain over proprietary solutions?

“Key advantages of OpenNebula over proprietary solutions include substantial cost savings through a subscription-based model that eliminates dependency on active licenses, flexibility in adapting the code to meet unique needs, complete control and transparency for optimized performance and security, and an active ecosystem that supports integration without requiring a commercial subscription. Additionally, customers report up to 200% increased density, maximizing hardware use and reducing costs and environmental impact.”

OpenNebula claims to be more cost-effective than VMware. Can you explain how this cost efficiency is achieved?

“OpenNebula cost savings of up to an order of magnitude compared to VMware-based enterprise cloud deployments.. For a private cloud setup with 10 servers (each with two CPUs and 48 cores), OpenNebula can reduce costs by up to 5x compared to Broadcom vSphere Foundation and up to 30x compared to Broadcom vSphere Cloud Foundation. These savings stem from a lower Total Cost of Ownership, zero CapEx since OpenNebula is fully open source, and reduced OpEx through subscriptions based on host count rather than per-socket licensing, as with Broadcom VMware.”

How does OpenNebula’s open source methodology reduce vendor lock-in and promote innovation compared to proprietary solutions from non-EU cloud providers?

“We are at a critical turning point- a collective ‘awakening’ of the European industry to the risks posed by the technological dominance of large North American and Chinese corporations. This issue has long been a major concern for several strategic sectors within the European Union, including automotive, aerospace, energy, healthcare, and, of course, defense and telecommunications. In the ongoing debate on how to strengthen the global competitiveness of European industry – especially in the post-pandemic landscape – the vulnerabilities in supply chains are under close scrutiny.”

“Open source products are fantastic – they enable companies to contribute, innovate, and even use them as a foundation for differentiation. However, we need to adopt a new approach if we want to make a real impact on the market. Our efforts must align with the business models of companies. It’s not just about technological collaboration – it’s primarily about business cooperation to create added value. Our focus is on defining an integrated architecture with the core building blocks of cloud-edge solutions, along with an open integration ecosystem that includes a certification process. This would validate specific cloud-edge configurations, ensuring that the components can be commercially supported by the industry.”

How does OpenNebula’s approach to security and data protection compare with proprietary solutions, particularly in terms of compliance with European regulations?

“Most companies’ encryption solutions have traditionally focused on protecting data at rest (storage encryption) and data in transit (network encryption), with limited attention to data in use. Confidential Computing introduces a new layer of cybersecurity that ensures the protection and integrity of data while it is actively being processed within the confines of a processor. Our primary objective is to extend the benefits of confidential computing to distributed cloud-edge environments. This involves offering a secure method to process data in protected, distributed zones that integrate resources from remote edge nodes and cloud provider servers.”

“The next significant challenge is enabling end-to-end Confidential Computing across a highly distributed computing continuum, ensuring complete data security – whether the data is at rest, in transit, or in use. The goal is to bring confidentiality to the entire data lifecycle, ensuring protection during storage, transmission, and processing. End-to-end Confidential Computing will facilitate the secure integration of untrusted resources, whether from public cloud providers or on-premises edge locations, support secure interoperability between cloud systems, and drive the development of new AI-driven tools for cyber threat intelligence.”

How is OpenNebula supporting the requirements for automation, AI, and multi-cloud capabilities that are necessary to promote the competitiveness of European cloud providers?

“OpenNebula follows an open source philosophy that enables the integration of innovations from all participating companies, creating integrated and tailored solutions to meet the needs of strategic sectors for the European Commission. Individually, companies cannot compete with the large providers; we are focused on generating synergies by leveraging shared resources, accumulated expertise, and collective market presence.”

“Dynamic provisioning allows the creation of distributed cloud-edge infrastructures on demand, utilizing resources from different providers. Interoperability ensures that applications can run seamlessly without modification and even migrate across different providers. Uniform management simplifies the administration of infrastructures comprising resources from multiple providers. The ultimate goal is to create a ‘virtual hyperscaler,’ composed of resources from various European cloud providers, which together can achieve the scale needed to compete with the large non-European providers.”

“One of our primary use cases is AI training. We are delivering a specific configuration designed to enable AI processing on-premises, tailored to meet the performance and resource demands of AI workloads.”

When it comes to hybrid cloud requirements in the European market, how is OpenNebula guaranteeing a flexible and scalable hybrid approach for its clients?

“The key innovation in our approach is portability and interoperability at the infrastructure level, enabling the execution and mobility of virtual machines across the Datacenter-Cloud-Edge Continuum. Our new platform will unify on-premises, cloud, and edge environments under a single infrastructure management layer that overlays them seamlessly. This approach enables organizations to treat infrastructure as a disposable commodity, offering the flexibility to run virtualized applications anywhere, from small on-prem clusters, 5G base stations, and windmill farms to retail shops, factories, trains, data centers, and public clouds. Additionally, it ensures a consistent deployment and management experience, including uniform image formats, templates, security policies, access control, monitoring metrics, and catalog management, creating a truly vendor-neutral environment.”

“The platform requires bare-metal cloud providers and on-prem servers at core and edge locations to build the underlying infrastructure. This approach offers the best of both worlds: the agility, scalability, and simplicity of the public cloud, combined with the flexibility, performance, and security of a single-tenant, dedicated environment.”

OpenNebula’s support for both containerized workloads as well as traditional virtual machines, what does it mean for the cloud management capabilities of a client?

“OpenNebula supports deploying Kubernetes clusters through its OneKE virtual appliance. OneKE (OpenNebula Kubernetes Engine) is available in the OpenNebula Public Marketplace. It is an enterprise-grade, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that simplifies the provisioning, operations, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes. OneKE makes it possible to run any type of containerized application on an OpenNebula cloud using a single toolset, whether on premises, on a public cloud, or at the edge.”

With the rise of edge computing, how is OpenNebula addressing the growing need for efficient, distributed cloud-edge infrastructures?

“OpenNebula comes out-of-the-box with a significant number of edge and 5G computing features, providing an easy way to build and manage highly-distributed edge cloud environments using private infrastructure at the edge. OpenNebula allows organizations to achieve a consistent application and operations experience across their entire Enterprise Cloud⁠ – from their private cloud or core data centers all the way to their private edge node deployments. Our aim is to improve flexibility, availability, efficiency, reliance, and scalability – while reducing latency and providing better application response times with an impressive small footprint by processing and storing data closer to users and devices.”

What do you see as the primary differences between OpenNebula and OpenStack, and why might a company choose OpenNebula over OpenStack?

“We have numerous customers who have successfully migrated from OpenStack, and we continue to receive several migration requests each week. Compared to OpenStack, OpenNebula is ideally suited for organizations seeking a lightweight, easy-to-deploy platform that excels in supporting hybrid and edge computing environments. OpenNebula delivers significant economic advantages, enabling enterprises to reduce complexity, optimize resource consumption, and lower overall operational costs.”

“In contrast, OpenStack consists of many subprojects, each with varying levels of maturity, requiring complex integration to build a functional cloud infrastructure – currently involving over 30 software components. For organizations aiming to deploy OpenStack with enterprise-level support and stability, vendors typically recommend using a commercial distribution rather than the standard ‘vanilla’ OpenStack version. These enterprise-grade distributions often incorporate different versions of OpenStack components, along with additional features, custom enhancements, and integrations that may diminish compatibility and interoperability across implementations.”

“Additionally, some OpenStack distributions rely on proprietary components and tools that are not fully open source. For instance, certain OpenStack vendors use their own proprietary tools for installation and operations, leading to vendor lock-in and limiting users’ ability to fully benefit from the openness and flexibility that open source software is designed to provide.”

How do you see the European cloud market evolving in the next five years, and what role will OpenNebula play in fostering competition and innovation?

“We anticipate that the innovative platform developed by OpenNebula as part of the IPCEI-CIS project will significantly disrupt the current cloud ecosystem with its new disaggregated cloud-edge architecture. This platform will seamlessly connect corporate users with both established and emerging cloud and edge infrastructure providers – including local data centers, cloud vendors, and 5G/telecom operators – via a neutral, two-sided marketplace. By minimizing vendor lock-in, this approach will create a more balanced cloud market, lower entry barriers, stimulate the development of new business models, and foster competition and innovation.”

About Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente

Dr. Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO of OpenNebula Systems, holds a PhD in computer science and an executive MBA. With 30 years of experience in scaling businesses and research in cloud and edge computing, he chairs the Cloud-Edge Working Group of the EU Cloud Alliance and is a member of the IPCEI-CIS Industry Facilitation Group.

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