The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs.

[3] OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2.

Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community.

The goals of the research were to create efficient solutions[buzzword] for managing virtual machines on distributed infrastructures.

OpenNebula orchestrates storage, network, virtualization, monitoring, and security[6] technologies to deploy multi-tier services (e.g. compute clusters[7][8]) as virtual machines on distributed infrastructures, combining both data center resources and remote cloud resources, according to allocation policies.

According to the European Commission's 2010 report "... only few cloud dedicated research projects in the widest sense have been initiated – most prominent amongst them probably OpenNebula ...".

OpenNebula is widely used by a variety of industries, including cloud providers, telecommunication, information technology services, government, banking, gaming, media, hosting, supercomputing, research laboratories, and international research projects[citation needed].

The datastores must be accessible to the front-end; this can be accomplished by using one of a variety of available technologies such as NAS, SAN, or direct attached storage.

Physical networks are required to support the interconnection of storage servers and virtual machines in remote locations.

The network subsystem of OpenNebula is easily customizable to allow easy adaptation to existing data centers.