OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

OpenNebula and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. OpenNebula holds a 6.8% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,255 Views
3,157 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 375 VMware Aria Operations reviews

6,636 Views
3,783 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and OpenNebula compete in the cloud management category. Based on the data, VMware Aria Operations has the upper hand due to its advanced analytics and predictive insights specifically tailored for VMware environments.

Features: VMware Aria Operations is distinguished by real-time analytics, integration with vCenter/ESXI, and dynamic thresholds, which provide predictive insights into VMware environments. It offers capacity management and proactivity through detailed metrics for issue prevention. OpenNebula, meanwhile, is noted for its flexibility and adaptability across various platforms while being less specialized in VMware contexts.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance user engagement by simplifying its reporting features and improving the user interface for beginners. Additionally, expanding integration capabilities with third-party tools would extend its applicability beyond VMware. OpenNebula needs to improve its documentation and customer support for clearer communication. Of note, the platform would benefit from more robust community backing and quicker feature updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations supports on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud deployments, with a recognized strong technical support network. However, reaching advanced support levels could be improved. OpenNebula is favored for its straightforward setup for on-premises and public cloud deployments, but it requires clearer communication channels and faster customer support response times.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations is on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, making it more appealing to larger enterprises with specific VMware needs, substantiated by a significant ROI in environments heavily utilizing VMware. OpenNebula offers a cost-effective open-source alternative with lower upfront and operational costs, making it desirable for budget-conscious scenarios, albeit with some limitations in advanced features compared to VMware Aria Operations.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

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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

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

375

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.8%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 7.7%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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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Amar Sorro

Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech

Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

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

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

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

"It is quite easy to deploy."

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

More OpenNebula pros

"The alerting feature would be the most valuable feature for us. It gathers more metrics. In the latest versions, there are metrics that are being exactly captured with vCenter which are a bit better. Aside for that it provides a historical analysis of metrics over time."

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to perform 'what-if' scenarios."

"We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it."

"It allows us to see the VM, our cluster utilization - the cluster level is what I work on the most. I'm able to see how much is being utilized, the rate of resource utilization, and when it will actually run out."

"When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information."

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."

"The most valuable feature is how our metrics interact with each other. You can find what objects are needed and get all of the information about an object: How it works with the storage, CPUs, memory, and you can get an easy way to find the solution during troubleshooting."

"It is stable. I don't have any problems with this product and upgrades are very easy because it's just click two buttons and next, next, next, finish."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

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

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

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

"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."

"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."

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

More OpenNebula cons

"It does the functions that we need it to. Although we do have some issues from time to time. We're looking for more maturity out of the product but it's getting better with every release."

"compare-to-competition; We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method. vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff."

"It can get a bit complex when getting into the endpoint monitoring during setup."

"We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through this tool, that would be a nice-to-have."

"We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible."

"There were challenges with VMware Aria Operations; the first problem was hardware compatibility."

"We would like to have monitoring for containers."

"For me, the technical support is the biggest problem. I've been working with them since 2016 and in the first years their response was faster than it is today. That is a problem. Also, I need to put together and send them a lot of information. And then I wait one day, two days. The support has been getting worse over the last few years. They need to improve it."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

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

"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."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."

"As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well."

"The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way."

"We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price."

"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."

"The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good."

"The pricing is a little bit expensive. Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved."

"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

See all answers

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

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 48% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 12% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 9% of the time

AWS Control Tower vs OpenNebula

Compared 1% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 19% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

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

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

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