CloudStack vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Apache and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 4.7% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 7.4% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 32 CloudStack reviews

2,031 Views
1,848 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 375 VMware Aria Operations reviews

6,374 Views
3,697 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

CloudStack

VMware Aria Operations

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and CloudStack both compete in the cloud management and virtualization domain. VMware Aria Operations seems to have the upper hand with its intensive monitoring and predictive analytics, which provides a proactive approach to IT management.

Features: VMware Aria Operations offers robust monitoring and management tools that allow users to collect data and use real-time analytics to adjust policies for optimized performance. Its dynamic thresholding and predictive analytics help anticipate and mitigate potential issues. CloudStack provides strong multi-hypervisor support and scalability, catering to diverse cloud environments. Its API integration facilitates diverse operations and supports different hypervisors efficiently.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance its usability by simplifying the interface and improving third-party tool integration. Users suggest the need for more intuitive reporting and automation features, along with expanded documentation for customizations. CloudStack users recommend interface improvements and enhanced documentation to better address integration capabilities and user feedback during deployment.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations supports both on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, presenting users with flexible deployment choices. It generally receives positive feedback for customer service, though technical support experiences may vary. CloudStack also benefits from a strong community support structure and offers several deployment models, including public cloud capabilities, although professional support could be expanded for complex setups.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations can be expensive, particularly for large deployments, but it promises a strong return on investment by optimizing operational efficiency and minimizing downtime. Licensing options are varied and should be closely aligned with business needs. As an open-source platform, CloudStack eliminates licensing fees, presenting a cost advantage, though there might be expenses related to dedicated support and additional features. This flexibility and cost-effectiveness make it appealing for organizations aiming to manage expenses.

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

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,295 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

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

375

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 4.7%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 7.4%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Nelson Marcos

Engineer Manager at Globo.com

It's easier to provision VMs than other solutions and you can customize it to integrate with load balancers

My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services.

Read full review

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

"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."

"Key features include stability, centralized management design that scales well, and transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers.."

"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."

"Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits."

"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."

"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."

"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."

"You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules."

More CloudStack pros

"It tells us when there's an issue with a particular VM or host. It gives us a remediation in order to fix that problem. For example, if there's a shortage of memory or a shortage of CPU, things of that nature, it tells you how to correct that issue."

"Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important."

"It has helped us improve our end users lives with our Horizon VDI monitoring. We can look at our Horizon environment, see our response times for our users, quickly drill into any latency issues, and proactively troubleshoot without the end user not even knowing."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful."

"VMware Aria Operations is the leading industrial solution for monitoring VMware infrastructure stacks. It has evolved to provide more insights into customer capacity planning and has become more data-driven. The level of monitoring and the granularity it offers are unmatched by any other product in the infrastructure management market."

"It speeds up time for troubleshooting and it gives simple-to-use dashboarding for executives and managers to be able to see what the issues are in an easy way, so they can escalate or question. From an operations side it lets you get to the core of the apple and figure out the problem quickly."

"Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great."

"For me, the most valuable feature of vROps is its reporting. We use the reports to send information to certain groups within our company to help forecast the use of resources."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."

"The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."

"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."

"The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization."

"From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2."

"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."

More CloudStack cons

"vROps has a hypervisor level of monitoring going on in our data center. We are using other products, like SolarWinds, to have a service and OS-level of monitoring. Because we are using two solutions simultaneously for different levels of monitoring, it would be really nice in the future to have a service monitoring or OS-level of monitoring in vROps, e.g., adding the support online for monitoring services, like Linux services, Linux Databases, and Linux servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory, or other Microsoft services, since we use them a lot. It would definitely help us in the future if vROps implemented this feature."

"We would like the default views on the reports for this solution to be improved; at present we have to customize the view before use."

"Administration and growth can be improved."

"In the beginning, I picked up an implementation that had been designed wrong from the ground up."

"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."

"We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that."

"Security has been a boom for companies in the last few years, and considering how important security is, there have been a lot of tools that offer better integrations. So, the current tool can be used for any integrations in any environment, which is something VMware is not yet that efficient at."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license."

"So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well."

"The licensing is not clear at the moment if the on-premises pricing is the same as on the cloud. I am checking on the pricing. However, you can save a lot of money with the cloud solution because you need to spend time installing, upgrading, and connecting with the on-premises solution. Also, you don't need to spend time scheduling the maintenance and maintaining the solution when using the cloud version."

"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."

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

"We have seen huge ROI. It has certainly reduced troubleshooting."

"Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here. I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten."

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

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

865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Educational Organization

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

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 CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product. Additionally, more themes and drag-and-drop interfaces could enhance the user experience. Improved document...

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

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 73% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 20% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% 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

CloudStack

August 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

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

Overview

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Apache

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

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

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

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Free Report: CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations report.

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.