A Comparison and Critique of Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and Nimbus

Eucalyptus, Open Nebula and Nimbus are three major open-source cloud-computing software platforms. The overall function of these systems is to manage the provisioning of virtual machines for a cloud providing infrastructure-as-a-service. These various open-source projects provide an important alternative for those who do not wish to use a commercially provided cloud. We provide a comparison and analysis of each of these systems. We begin with a short summary comparing the current raw feature set of these projects. After that, we deepen our analysis by describing how these cloud management frameworks relate to the many other software components required to create a functioning cloud computing system. We also analyse the overall structure of each of these projects and address how the differing features and implementations reflect the different goals of each of these projects. Lastly, we discuss some of the common challenges that emerge in setting up any of these frameworks and suggest avenues of further research and development. These include the problem of fair scheduling in absence of money, eviction or preemption, the difficulties of network configuration, and the frequent lack of clean abstractions.