OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

OpenNebula and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.0, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. OpenNebula holds a 1.6% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,459 Views
3,286 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 172 VMware Aria Automation reviews

17,011 Views
9,696 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and OpenNebula are competitors in the cloud management space. VMware Aria Automation holds the upper hand with extensive automation features and robust integration capabilities, which can be critical for enterprises seeking comprehensive cloud management.

Features: VMware Aria Automation's standout features include mass parallel administration, remote CLI access, and vendor-specific integrations such as SaltStack for faster deployment. It offers advanced orchestration capabilities and is particularly strong in cloud management. OpenNebula's simplicity and lightweight design are key features, making it highly suitable for straightforward deployments. It effectively supports various hypervisors and is preferred for on-premises deployments.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation requires better documentation, more intuitive UI, and enhanced template management. There's also a need for improved integration with platforms like Azure. OpenNebula needs enhancements in documentation and managing complex environments, alongside improvements in its marketplace and template creation support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation supports both on-premises and hybrid environments, offering knowledgeable technical support, although it can vary in responsiveness due to customization capabilities. OpenNebula is user-friendly for on-premises deployments and relies on community-based support, which is collaborative but lacks direct support compared to VMware's tiered system.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is a paid product and is often seen as expensive but provides valuable features and integration capabilities that can justify the cost for enterprises. It offers potential ROI through improved automation and reduced deployment times. OpenNebula, being open-source, offers a cost-effective alternative with lower overhead, providing good value for those seeking flexibility without significant investments, though potentially offering less enterprise-level functionality.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Automation

August 2026

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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

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (21st), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation	5.5%
OpenNebula	1.6%
Other	92.9%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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VasilisGiannitsiotis

Senior IT at ITSolutions

Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration

Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."

"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

More OpenNebula pros

"VMware Aria Automation supports integration with ServiceNow, Kubernetes, and other tools. It is cloud-agnostic, making it a stronger platform than Ansible."

"The time for provisioning a VM for one of our clients was cut in half, and we can now provide a solution to a customer on the same day that the request is made, whereas previously it would have taken us days and we often found instances where errors were made or things were forgotten."

"SaltStack provides the capability necessary to truly streamline our SDLC and environment management."

"Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."

"SaltStack gave us very useful automation tools that allowed us to standardize our environment, move at a much faster pace through repeatable deployments, and self-documentation of our infrastructure."

"Using this solution has greatly reduced the time it takes to deploy a server; it used to take at least one month, whereas now, to deploy a server takes two hours."

"It requires very limited time to set up an enterprise environment."

"It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

More OpenNebula cons

"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."

"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."

"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."

"I rate it a seven out of ten because it needs improvement in stability, performance, and quality."

"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."

"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."

"Every time it was failing with different errors. This used to be a one day job, and it has been a one week job."

"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."

"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."

"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

University

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	33
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	131

Questions from the Community

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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...

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Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?

When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

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Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?

I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

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Comparisons

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 16% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

HashiCorp Terraform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 3% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 3% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

July 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

July 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

OpenNebula offers scalability, ease of deployment, and integration capabilities that enhance cloud management for enterprises. It supports both virtual and bare metal resources, providing a versatile cloud management experience.

OpenNebula provides a robust platform for building, managing, and automating private and public clouds. Its compatibility with platforms like VMware, KVM, and containers makes it ideal for businesses hosting virtual private clouds and deploying Kubernetes clusters. OpenNebula's API and SDK facilitate automation and integration, allowing organizations to connect with IT systems effectively. Despite its strengths, improvements in object storage, REST API integration, and UI enhancements are needed. The documentation can be disorganized, and users encounter challenges with upgrades and community support.

What are key OpenNebula features?

Scalability: Easily manage resources for growing cloud environments.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies cloud management tasks.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with IT systems using robust API and SDK.
Hypervisor Support: Works with multiple hypervisors and container platforms.

What benefits do users find in OpenNebula?

Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations, reducing management complexities.
Versatility: Offers support for both virtual and bare metal resources.
Community and Documentation: Though needing improvement, provides valuable resources for users.
Cost-Effectiveness: Lightweight nature minimizes resource expenditure.

OpenNebula implementation spans industries where cloud automation and management are critical. Companies utilize OpenNebula for deploying private clouds and managing infrastructure. Its support for Kubernetes clusters is beneficial in tech-driven sectors, highlighting OpenNebula's adaptability to different operational needs.

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Automation is known for its automation capabilities, integrating with VMware and third-party tools to enhance workflow efficiency, save time, and manage resources effectively.

VMware Aria Automation offers a diverse set of features including a self-service portal and a streamlined user-friendly interface, which make it ideal for organizations aiming to automate virtual machine provisioning. The platform supports extensive automation capabilities across multi-cloud environments, featuring flexible blueprint designs and comprehensive integration with platforms like AWS, Azure, and ServiceNow. Though improvements are desired in areas like logging, template management, and vCenter integration, its robust framework facilitates IT infrastructure services, disaster recovery, and development operations. It is specifically beneficial for orchestrating workflows, automating routine tasks, and managing workloads efficiently in private and hybrid cloud environments.

What are the most important features of VMware Aria Automation?

Self-Service Portal: Empowers users with easy access to resources and tools needed for automation.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies navigation and usage for both technical and non-technical users.
Extensive Automation Capabilities: Streamlines VM deployment and processes across various platforms.
Integration with VMware and Third-Party Tools: Enhances workflow automation and extends functionality.
Flexible Blueprint Designs: Allows for customized and scalable deployment solutions.

What are the benefits and ROI users should consider?

Efficiency: Reduces manual workload, leading to time and cost savings.
Scalability: Supports dynamic growth and resource management.
Enhanced Workflow Automation: Improves process efficiency with comprehensive integrations.
Customizable Orchestration: Enables tailored solutions that meet specific requirements.
Resource Management: Efficiently utilizes resources, reducing waste and optimizing operations.

VMware Aria Automation is implemented across industries for automating the provisioning of virtual machines and managing cloud environments. It is used in sectors requiring efficient server deployment, network configurations, and seamless integration with tools such as AWS and Azure. It aids in reducing manual efforts, supporting IT infrastructure services, and enhancing disaster recovery protocols.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Automation

August 2026

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Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.

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