What does it takes to bring innovations like private clouds to small and medium enterprises? In the course of this talk we will present our experience in creating a self-service toolkit for creating a complete virtualization and cloud platform based on OpenNebula, as well as our experience gathered in tens of installations of all sizes. From scalable storage (with benchmarks!) to autonomic optimization, we will present what in our view is needed to bring private clouds to everyone, what components and additions we created to better solve our customers’ problems (from replacing industrial control systems to medium scale virtual desktop infrastructures), and why OpenNebula has been chosen over other competing cloud toolkits. Bio: Carlo Daffara the Technical director of Cloudweavers, and formerly head of research and development at Conecta, a consulting firm specializing in open source systems and distributed computing; Italian member of the European Working Group on Libre Software and co-coordinator of the working group on SMEs of the EU ICT task force on competitiveness. Since 1999, works as evaluator for IST programme submissions in the field of component-based software engineering, GRIDs and international cooperation. Coordinator of the open source platforms technical area of the IEEE technical committee on scalable computing, co-chair of the SIENA EU cloud initiative roadmap editorial board and part of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP).