My boss made me a aware of an Open Source IaaS CMP a few days back called vOneCloud based on Open Nebula. I had seen Open Nebula before but didn’t actually know there was VMware compatible version. So I gave it a try in the lab.

I downloaded the OVF appliance from http://vonecloud.today/ followed the instructions to set it up. Fairly Simple.

You have do what you’d expect from a CMP and add in your cloud/virtualisation platform which I did. Something that is worth mentioning is it also supports KVM, Xen, AWS etc etc etc which is quite awesome for an open source product.

You then have the ability to carve out resources in VDC just like you would in vCloud Director and align those VDCs to users/groups.

You also have the ability to create a catalog from vSphere Templates.

The one irritating thing though is there is no control over datastores. So you cannot add which datastore for a user to choose where a template is deployed. I guess probably the best thing to do is align that with cluster configuration when you do the setup.

Also I’m not sure how you’d do any post deployment automation which today we use products like vRA and vRO from VMware todo.

Anyway since its FREE I’d say it could be a good alternative to something like vCloud Director. Given that VMware pulled the plug on selling vCloud Director for Private Cloud use this may be your answer. If you’ve followed any of my VMUG sessions you’d know we still plan to move ahead with vRA in place of vCloud Director but again Open Nebula is FREE, expect when you need support.