OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

OpenNebula and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Broadcom is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. OpenNebula holds a 5.7% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 9.4% 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

3,009 Views
2,889 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,662 Views
4,137 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Automation

September 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 Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 5.7%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.4%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	9.4%
OpenNebula	5.7%
Other	84.9%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Thomas Bennett

Manager, DevOps System Engineering team at MX

Robust with great CLI tools and UI

I've found OpenNebula upgrades to be more complex than those of some of the competitors and the support to be mediocre. I would also like to see more and better ancillary tools related to OpenNebula, for example, more robust tools for backups, user support, etc. The support knows their software stack reasonably well. However, OpenNebula depends on so many open-source projects that they lack expertise. As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today.

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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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 has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

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

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

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

"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."

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

More OpenNebula pros

"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."

"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."

"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."

"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

"Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers."

"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."

"The product's most valuable features are ease of automation."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

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

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

"They should add more features like object storage."

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

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

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

"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 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."

"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."

"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."

"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."

"In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent."

"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."

"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."

"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is open source so is free."

"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."

"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."

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

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."

"The solution is free of cost."

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

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

"It is an open-source product."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

University

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

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 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 ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 43% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 12% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

Compared 4% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 13% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

HashiCorp Terraform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

September 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

September 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

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 Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

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

September 2025

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