2012 9th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2012)

Comparison of Open-Source Cloud Management Platforms: OpenStack and

OpenNebula

Xiaolong Wen1, Genqiang Gu1, Qingchun Li1, Yun Gao1,2, Xuejie Zhang1,2,*
1
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, P.R.China
2
High Performance Computing Center, Yunnan University, Kunming, P.R.China
wxlong1222@gmail.com, gugenqiang@126.com, lqcone@gmail.com, gaoyun@ynu.edu.cn, xjzhang@ynu.edu.cn

Abstract—Cloud management platforms may manage the
resources provided by the infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
cloud. With the rapid development of open-source cloud
platforms, they have been widely used due to open and free,
some of them can substitute commercial clouds. Some existed
related works only concisely compare the basic features of
open-source platforms, and not including some new released
features. In this paper, we firstly present the function of
OpenStack and OpenNebula briefly, and then compare them
from provenance, architecture, hypervisors, security and other
angles in detail. Moreover, we provide some deployment
recommendations according to different user demands and
platform characteristics.
Keywords-Open Source; Cloud Platforms; Cloud Computing;
IaaS; OpenStack; OpenNebula
I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing [1,2] is a computing model which we
don’t need to compute or store resources on local computers.
On the contrary, resources like computing power, storage
and software are abstracted and provided as services on the
Internet by the third-party which is called cloud providers.
Some famous cloud providers are Amazon [3,4], Google [5]
and Microsoft [6], etc. From a cloud provider’s view, IaaS
(Infrastructure as a Service) is the low-level in the cloud,
aims at providing compute and storage resources and virtual
machines to users. Users of IaaS can completely control and
configure their infrastructure resources as what they want,
EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) and S3 (Simple Storage
Service) of Amazon are the most successful examples [3,4].
However, these commercial clouds usually charge high price
based on how many resources you use. In some settings, it
might be more suitable for enterprises or organizations to
build their own cloud. That is the reason why open-source
cloud platforms and communities become buzzwords and be
active now.
With the emergence of different open-source cloud
platforms, the decision to choose the most suitable one that
meets the customers’ needs becomes a difficult task, because
every platform has its specific characteristics. Therefore, a
number of papers begin to research and compare each
platform, [9] makes a qualitative overview and compares
architecture and different implementation of features, [10]
conducts a survey and classification of open-source solutions
and compare them from different angles, [11] does a
comparison and analysis and also points out some challenges
of further development, [12] gives an object description,
compares from some basic aspects and provides specific
recommendations for use, [13] discusses an elaborate set of
evaluation criteria that can be used to evaluate the stability,
performance and features of open-source clouds and
compares some available platforms, [14] conducts a survey
to help readers choose the best one with their needs and build
their own cloud infrastructure.
From what present above, we can get an idea that these
papers only focus on the basic features such as architecture,
service type and virtualization, etc. And they almost present
a summary of each platform and don’t give a presentation in
detail. At the same time, some platforms are developing
constantly. Therefore, some new features and functions are
not introduced and compared in these papers, and most of
them also overlook some new released but widely accepted
platforms such as OpenStack. Due to these, we only choose
OpenStack and OpenNebula to compare in this paper. It is
organized as follows. In Section 2, we make an overview of
OpenStack and OpenNebula. In Section 3, we conduct a
detailed introduction and comparison from provenance,
architecture and virtualization, etc. Further, we briefly
address the differences from other aspects like license,
programming language and service type, etc. In Section 4,
we provide some suggestions for use. The last section
concludes the paper and gives lights to our future work.
II. OPENSTACK AND OPENNEBULA
Due to high costs of physical servers and managing data,
IaaS Cloud is the next step in the evolution of some
companies’ data centers. OpenStack and OpenNebula are the
two major open-source IaaS cloud platforms and they are
currently widely used by people around the world. These are
the reasons why we choose them to evaluate. Some brief
introductions of them are presented below：
z OpenStack [7,13,14] is a collection of open source
software projects that enterprises or cloud providers
can use to setup and run their cloud compute and
storage infrastructure. The project aims to build an
open-source community with researchers, developers
and enterprises, they share a common goal to create
a cloud that is simple to deploy, massively scalable
and full of rich features.
z OpenNebula [8,10,11,12,13] is an open source
project aimed at building the industry standard open-

978-1-4673-0024-7/10/$26.00 ©2012 IEEE 2457

 source cloud computing tool to manage the
complexity and heterogeneity of large and
distributed infrastructures. It can offer the richest
features, flexible ways and better interoperability to
build private, public or hybrid clouds.
III. COMPARISON OF OPENSTACK AND OPENNEBULA
A. Provenance
For OpenStack [7], Rackspace and NASA are the two
contributors. OpenStack includes three major parts: compute
what we called Nova is from NASA’s compute files, object
storage what we called Swift is from Rackspace’s “Cloud
Files” and Image service which is named Glance. It has
become very popular and been widely accepted by people
and enterprises such as Citrix, Dell, SUSE around the world
when it appeared in July 2010. Now, OpenStack’s
community has collaborated with more than 150 companies
and 2600 people. The numbers are increasing continuously.
OpenNebula [8] was established as a research project
back in 2005. However, the first public released version v1.0
was in March 2008 and the latest version is v3.2. Despite this,
it is much earlier than OpenStack. OpenNebula [8,10,11,13]
is the accumulation in the area of management of virtual
machines and large scale distribution infrastructures
especially big data centers through many years. At present, it
has more than 4000 downloads per month and many research
institutes and enterprises use it to build their own cloud, an
successful example is CHINA MOBILE which uses it to
build its cloud which named Big Cloud.
B. Architecture
Currently, OpenStack [7] not only has three core projects:
compute (Nova), storage (Swift), image (Glance), it also add
two new projects: Dashboard (Horizon) and Identity
(Keystone). All these projects indicate that OpenStack is
striving to integrate more services into it so that provide a
massively scalable and rich services cloud. The architecture
can be seen in Fig. 1.
z As a major part of OpenStack, Nova [7] is the
computing fabric controller for the OpenStack Cloud.
It has six components including Nova-API, Message
Queue, Nova-Compute, Nova-Network, Nova-
Volume and Nova-Scheduler. Nova supports all the
life cycles of instances in the cloud, so we can view
it as a management platform that manage compute
resources, networking, authorization and scalability
of needs. All components in the architecture follow a
shared-nothing and messaging-based policy, shared-
nothing means that each component or each group of
components can be installed on any server. For
example, compute controller, volume controller,
network controller and object store can be installed
on a server or four independently servers. As we can
see from Fig. 1, Queue Server is in the middle of the
architecture, the meaning of messaging-based is that
cloud controller communicates with all components
Figure 1. OpenStack Core Architecture
such as volume, network and scheduler via Queue
Server in advanced message queue protocol (AMQP)
except that internal object store which interacts with
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. At the same time, all
communications use a way which called
asynchronous eventually consistent communication
to transport message. This means that a call-back
gets triggered once a response is received, and the
benefits are that none of the users’ actions get struck
for long in a waiting state [7].
z Swift [7], the storage infrastructure in OpenStack, is
a scalable object storage system including a Proxy
Server, an Object Server, an Account Server, a
Container Server and the Ring. It is a long-term
storage system for a more permanent type of static
data that can be retrieved, leveraged and updated [7].
It is similar to Amazon’s S3, we can encapsulate it to
provide a cloud storage service. The main functions
and features are secure storage of large number and
size objects, data redundancy, archival capabilities
and media streaming.
z The OpenStack image solution [7] is to build a
lookup and retrieval system from virtual machine
images, under the known name of Glance. Glance-
Control and Glance-Registry are the two parts of
Glance and it only provides a function that is
imaging service.
z Horizon [7], which provides a user interface based
on browser, makes it easier to manage the cloud
services.
z Keystone [7] is a cloud identity which provides a
common authentication and authorization layer and
an OpenStack service catalog.
We can get a conclusion from Fig. 1 that the architecture
and components of OpenStack are straightforward and stable,
so OpenStack will be a good choice to provide specific
applications for enterprises and can encapsulate specific
commercial services easily.
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Figure 2. OpenStack Core Architecture
OpenNebula [8,10,11,13,15] is an open-source toolkit
aims to provide a flexible, open, scalable and comprehensive
management layer to manage and simplify the operation of
big data centers and transform existing infrastructure into an
Iaas Cloud. Fig. 2 shows the OpenNebula architecture and
main components. OpenNebula’s architecture is flexible and
modular, which makes it easier than OpenStack to integrate
multiple storages, network infrastructures and hypervisor
technologies. OpenNebula architecture includes three layers:
Drivers, Core and Tools.
z Drivers layer [8,9,10,11] contains many important
components in the OpenNebula. It communicates
directly with the underlying operating system and
encapsluates the underlying infrastructure as an
abstract service. The functions are responsible for
the creation, startup and shutdown of virtual
machines (VMs), allocating storage for VMs and
monitoring the operational status of physical
machines and VMs.
z The core layer [8,9,10,11] is a centralized layer that
manage the virtual machines’ full life cycles,
including setting up a virtual network dynamically
so that allocate a dynamic IP address for a VM,
which makes the networking solution transparent to
users, and managing a VM’s storage allocating such
as a VM’s disk.
z Tools layer [8,9,10,11] provides some interfaces
such as command line interface (CLI), browser and
libvirt API [9,10,11,12] to communicate with users
and users can manage VM through these interfaces.
A sheduler manages the functionality provided by
the core layer. External users are capable of sharing
these functionalities through a cloud interface which
is provided by Tools layer.
Regarding the storage, image repository [8] is to store
and manage registered images. It allows administrators and
users to set up their own images, these images can be used
in VM easily and shared with other users. By default,
OpenNebula uses a shared file system [8,9,10], typically
NFS or GlusterFS to store all files. The benefit of this is that
it provides more of the low-level features to the users and
administrators. It also can work without a shared FS, Secure
Copy (SCP) can be used to transfer files [9,10,11]. This is
very different to OpenStack’s Swift.
What shown above hint that OpenNebula doesn’t bound
to a certain type of environment and can provide a uniform
management criterion no matter what the virtualization
platform, so it is more suitable to some research institutes
which want to build their own cloud and can expand any
funtions such as cloud storage as what they want.
C. Virtualization Hypervisors
In cloud computing, virtualization hypervisor [14] is used
to describe the interface provided by the specific
functionality of IaaS. It is also called virtual machine
manager (VMM), is one of many hardware virtualization
techniques allowing multiple operating systems, termed
guests, to run concurrently on a host computer [14]. In
literature [14], the paper conducts a detailed introduction and
comparison about VM monitors. Based on this paper, we get
that Xen, KVM and VMWare are three preferred solutions in
cloud computing. In Table I, we list some famous
hypervisors and make a comparison between OpenStack and
OpenNebula, which one supports the hypervisor will get a
“yes (Y)”, not will get a “no (N)”.
From Table I, we can get a conclusion that OpenStack
almost support all available hypervisors including which not
listed in the Table I such as ESX, QEMU and UML,
however, OpenNebula only support three: Xen, KVM and
VMWare currently.
TABLE I. COMPARISON BETWEEN OPENSTACK AND OPENNEBULA
OF VIRTUALIZATION HYPERVISOR SUPPORTED
Hypervisors
Open-Source
Project Xen
Xen KVM HyperV VMWare LXC
Server
OpenStack Y Y Y Y Y Y
OpenNebula Y Y N N Y N
D. Scale and Activity Level of Community
OpenStack and OpenNebula are open-source platforms,
so their development can’t separate from the contributions
from the community. A community may consist of
individuals, teams and organizations, so no matter you are a
user, a developer, a service provider, even a corporation, you
can join in the community and contribute yourself to build a
better open-source cloud. We have done a statistics about the
users of community and find that most users of OpenStack
are people from companies and OpenNebula are from
universities, research institutes and data centers. We believe
that the number of mailing list is important and useful, it also
reflects the level of activity of a community, so we pick
some data about the number of total participants from the
mailing lists of OpenStack [7] and OpenNebula [8], and then
do a comparison, see Fig. 3. As what shows from Fig. 3, the
number’s trend of OpenNebula is almost increasing,
however, the trend of OpenStack is increasing more than
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OpenNebula when it appeared in July 2010, its number of
participants is also bigger than OpenNebula.
Figure 3. Total Number of Participants from Community Mailing Lists of
OpenStack and OpenNebula
E. Cloud APIs and User Interface
Cloud APIs [10,11,12,13] are application programming
interfaces used to build applications in the cloud computing
market. For OpenStack, API (Nova-API) [7] is the only
component that the outside world uses to manage the cloud.
OpenStack exposes all its functionalities through a web
service API which is compatible with the EC2 and S3 API of
Amazon Web Service (AWS), it also provides a native API
called OpenStack API. OpenNebula provides two APIs:
Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) API and EC2 API.
All APIs except EC2 API provided by OpenStack and
OpenNebula are based on Representational State Transfer
(REST) [16] which is a style of software architecture for
distributed hepermidia systems. Functionalities of EC2 API
are: upload images, register them, run, monitor and terminate
instances, etc. Therefore, they can use tool Euca2ools to
manage the cloud resources. Most of these operations are
based on command line.
In additon to using command line interface (CLI) to
manage resources, OpenStack and OpenNebula also provide
a user interface based on browser for users. This is easier to
understand and operate than CLI. DashBoard [7], a new
project of OpenStack, makes users easier to manage the
cloud services. For OpenNebula, users can manage cloud
services through Sunstone, a graphical user interface [8].
F. Security
Security is a fundamental goal of cloud computing, for
exanple, many researchers consider cloud security as the
most challenging issue in the cloud computing and are
rushing to study it. Similarly, it is also a hot issue of Iaas.
OpenStack and OpenNebula all treat is as a key point, so
they take many measures to ensure the secutiry.
OpenStack add a new project Keystone [7] to provide
services for authenticating, managing and authorizing user
and account. It provides unified authentication across all
projects and integrates with existing authentication systems
[7]. It has some key concepts such as: user, credentials,
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authentication, token, tenant and role, etc. We can know
from what shown above, OpenStack spend much time to
develop a good way to ensure security and concentrate on
the authentication and authorization. It divides user into a
very small granularity and grants to different roles. A user
has a login and maybe assigned tokens to access resources.
And a role has a specific set of operations, rights and
privileges. The user inherits these rights and privileges from
the role which it belongs to [7]. Of course, VPN (Virtual
Private Network) connectivity and firewall rules are also
used in Nova-Network.
OpenNebula also develops various ways to protect its
cloud. The same as OpenStack, OpenNebula owns a secure
and efficient Users and Groups Subsystem for pluggable
authentication and authorization based on passwords, SSH
and RSA key code pairs, X509 certificates or LDAP [8].
Firewall, an old but useful method, is used to configure for
VMs, in order to shutdown TCP and UDP ports, filter some
unwanted packets and define a policy for ICMP connections.
ACL (Access Control List) also is used in OpenNebula. An
ACL is a collections of permit and deny conditions, called
ACL rules, it enables for any user or group of users. Each
operation generates a request and ACL then can grant
permission and refuse the request according to the registered
set of ACL rules. VDC (Virtual Data Center) appears in the
released version v3.0. A VDC [17] is a fully-isolated virtual
infrastructure environment, in the environment, under the
control of the VDC administrators, users can manage cloud
resources, but users only can see the virtual resources not
the physical infrastructure. Of course, we can use ACL rules
in the VDC and this is an effective way.
G. Other Aspects
From Part A to F, we introduce and compare OpenStack
and OpenNebula from six important aspects in detail. Of
course, it is impossible to list all aspects and compare them.
In this part, we aim at giving a more detailed description
and evaluation, so we list some other factors which are not
shown in previous parts and make a simple comparison. The
results can be seen in Table II.
TABLE II. OTHER FACTORS OF OPENSTACK AND OPENNEBULA
OpenStack OpenNebula
Open-Source Apache License Version Apache License Version
License 2.0 2.0
Cloud Types Private and public cloud
Private, public and hybrid
cloud
Most Linux
Supported OS
distributions
Most Linux distributions
Programming
Python Java and Ruby
Language
Data Memory Swift Shared FS or SCP
Compatalibity
with public Amazon EC2, S3 Amazon EC2
cloud
Commercial
Free Free
Model
 OpenStack OpenNebula
-Flat
Networking
-Flat DHCP VLAN
Model
-VLAN DHCP
Large data centers,
Large commercial research institutes,
Used by
enterprises universities and public
institutions
Build private and public
Provide cloud computing
Main Purpose services and resources
clouds
management
IV. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR USE
Section 2 and Section 3 illustrate the differences between
OpenStack and OpenNebula. Some suggestions for use will
be given below.
Because the compatibility of EC2 and S3, OpenStack can
offer the same services as Amazon and be the alternative of
Amazon to users who don’t want to use a billing cloud.
Therefore, OpenStack is more suitable for an enterprise.
Because you not only can require the resources dynamically,
you also can encapsulate its services as some applications,
for example, Swift can be used to provide a cloud storage
service. From a vendor’s view, OpenStack is a better choice
for commerce. Furthermore, OpenStack is straightforward
because the guide documentations can be seen on the website,
so it is possible to build a cloud even you have no any
specialist personnel [7,13,14].
OpenNebula is suitable both for research institutes,
universities and enterprises especially large data centers
which want to build an open, flexible and scalable cloud to
support their research and are interested in the VM
technology, it is also ideal for users that want to run a
number of cloud machines quickly [11,12,14,15]. And,
OpenNebula is well suitable for dealing with large amounts
of data and leveraging existing IT infrastructures, protecting
your investments and avoiding vendor lock-in [8]. Further,
similar to OpenStack, all the documentations such as
introduction and installation can be found in [8], this makes
you very easy to use and develop the platform.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we clearly show differences of OpenStack
and OpenNebula from provenance, architecture, hypervisors,
security and other angles, etc. We also present proposals for
implementation. We believe that this evaluation will help
people understand their functions, goals and diversities. The
recommendations will result in a better use of OpenStack
and OpenNebula.
In the future, we will utilize these two platforms to build
our own cloud and make a deeper research for resource
scheduling especially in the performance of image operation
and VMs management including creation, upload, save and
deletion, etc. Some features and functions will be added into
or updated with the development, so we will also research
and compare continuously.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No: 61170222), and the authors
also thank High Performance Computing Center of Yunnan
University for experimental support.
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