Abstract
In the last few years several open source private cloud platforms have appeared on the market side by side of many proprietary peers. Evaluating the existing open source private cloud software from different aspects makes it possible to determine which open source cloud software fits best to our hardware resources and budget. This thesis evaluates two of the major open source cloud platforms, OpenStack and OpenNebula, by investigating the deployment of the cloud platforms, and analyzing the user community and developer community of the software. Different criteria are defined in the form of questions, which are answered through systematic experiments.