If your data center is based on vSphere, CloudStack will use a vCenter API. This means that you will be able to manage your data processing center that has been dynamically deployed using vSphere 4.1.

Price: CloudStack is distributed for free under the GNU Public License v3. To get paid support, you should contact its developers via email.

Community: There is an ready to provide timely technical support for free. You can find solutions to many CloudStack issues on the Forum. There is also an where everyone is welcome to ask questions.

Documentation: If you have a basic technical background, it will be rather easy for you to install the CloudStack platform with default settings. If a more complex and complicated installation is required, you might experience some challenges, as the documentation does not cover complex issues in full. The manual gives step-by-step instructions but does not provide any information on how the platform functions in general.

Experience: We have performed installation, configured the system, and tried VMware as well as KVM clusters. CentOS 5.5 and CentOS 6.2 were used for the hosts. In addition, our engineering team connected our private cloud deployed with CloudStack to the RightScale management console. The platform was easy to install and performed as expected.