HashiCorp employee here. Nomad has an open source core which is very capable. There is an Enterprise edition for those that want support and access to several Enterprise features. Does the open source edition address your non commercial criteria?
I also found that Nomad looked promising for VM orchestration. In my case I was specifically looking to run Firecracker VMs. Unfortunately I found the Firecracker community driver [1] to be difficult to work with when setting up networking beyond a simple "hello world". It does not play well with Nomad's CNI plugin [2] and I could not get a working setup where Nomad, CNI and the guest would agree on an IP.
The firecracker driver is a community one, however, and the offical Qemu driver is most likely more polished. Did not try that one since it did not match my needs.
Does Nomad support typical VM orchestration like OpenStack or vSphere? It seems to me that it is more of just a generic driver that will do basic tasks.
Nomad supports it. I ran Nomad instead of Kubevirt at some point. Functionality was great, but it missed the live migration. My usecase did not require it, but it was later pointed out to me.
