Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco Piston Enterprise OS ...

Read 1 Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] review

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 376 VMware Aria Operations reviews

14,004 Views
8,682 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco Piston Enterprise OS ...

VMware Aria Operations

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] and VMware Aria Operations based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Management Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

May 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 893,438 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Piston Enterprise OS ...

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

376

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

Featured Reviews

Enterprise677

BS Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

A simple interface and helpful support for a solution that grows with us

It's a flexible enough tool to submit the changes that you want. It gives you the ability to cancel any loop. You can connect new orchestrations together. It offers enough support so that you don't need to have the need to get another device. The user interface is simple and easy to use.

Read full review

AldoDomini

Senior System Network Analyst at Net spa

Have faced limitations due to high costs but have maintained reliability over time

The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company. As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions. Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I strongly recommend the solution to people."

"It offers enough support so that you don't need to have the need to get another device."

"The most valuable feature is the metrics, the ability to deep-dive into any issue we may be having from a virtual machine to a data store."

"The most valuable feature I see is how it dynamically figures out the environment."

"The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users either say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. I think its cause we have it mainly based on our production units."

"It has helped me optimize certain VMs and made them more efficient."

"It's nicer for our customers, because if they say the server is slow, we can actually look and see if it really is slow or if it's their application, or figure out what's going on."

"VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it."

"The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite."

"With our customized dashboards, we can target issues and attribute them to the correct team, so we can quickly pass them off to the relevant team rather than have to go around in circles and have everybody say, "Not us.""

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"The solution is just too expensive, so maybe the pricing could be better."

"One of the expectations would be to have third-party integrations, plug-ins like with Lumidor."

"As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network."

"The pricing is a little bit expensive."

"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."

"It's complex to manage because there are a lot of options and metrics. It's complex when you want to do something very specific."

"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."

"I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, is an additional pack."

"The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."

"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."

"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."

"The pricing: It's expensive."

"We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."

"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."

"Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership."

"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Marketing Services Firm

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	281

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

See all answers

Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...

See all answers

What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...

See all answers

Comparisons

Abiquo vs Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL]

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL]

Compared 17% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

CloudStack vs Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] Competitors

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 5% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

May 2026

Download Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

April 2026

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Piston Enterprise OS

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)

Overview

Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS) is an enterprise grade cloud operating system meeting the security and governance needs of enterprises wanting to use OpenStack for their infrastructure services. pentOS is an OpenStack distro that builds on top of the OpenStack codebase adding some proprietary features to meet the security and governance needs of the enterprise customers.

Cisco

VMware Aria Operations provides detailed metrics, graphing capabilities, and historical data for proactive infrastructure management, offering a single pane of glass for comprehensive views, alert notifications, and seamless integration with VMware tools.

VMware Aria Operations is designed for monitoring and optimizing virtual environments, empowering businesses to enhance infrastructure efficiency and manage workloads. With stress ratings and capacity planning, it facilitates troubleshooting performance issues while forecasting resource needs. Automation and integration with VMware tools streamline operations, making it indispensable for maintaining system health and enabling data-driven decisions. Users appreciate its comprehensive infrastructure views, though they note the interface complexity and high pricing as key considerations. Improved automation, third-party integration, and usability are desired enhancements.

What are the key features of VMware Aria Operations?

Single Pane of Glass: Provides comprehensive views of infrastructure for easy management.
Performance Monitoring: Tracks performance with detailed metrics and trend analysis.
Capacity Planning: Offers insights into stress ratings and future resource needs.
Alert Notifications: Effectively notifies users of potential system issues.
Automation and Integration: Streamlines operations with VMware tools.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Infrastructure Efficiency: Ensures optimal use of virtual environments for effective workload management.
Operational Visibility: Improves decision-making with detailed insights and analytics.
Resource Optimization: Helps forecast and allocate resources efficiently.
Proactive Management: Facilitates early detection of issues to maintain system health.

VMware Aria Operations' implementation across industries like finance, healthcare, and education showcases its utility in maintaining operational efficiency. It aids in tracking usage metrics and integrating workflows, benefiting sectors with critical performance and resource management needs.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi

Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: May 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.