No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
376
Ranking in other categories
Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.9%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 4.1%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations4.1%
OpenNebula1.9%
Other94.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AldoDomini - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"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."
"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 is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"The most valuable features are the ability to look at performance metrics historically, and the capacity planning where we can see waste in our environment."
"It allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead."
"Capacity planning and workload optimization are good areas in the tool."
"It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics."
"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."
"For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production."
"It has helped our organization because now we have been able to reclaim about 40 percent of our infrastructure resources."
"We've managed to save quite a lot of resources because we haven't had to deal with the issues of over-provisioned VMs, which was a constant problem."
 

Cons

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
"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 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 UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"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."
"Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time."
"Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs."
"It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc."
"It's not very good, because it's such a difficult product."
"If you're not a vROps guy from the beginning, it's a high learning curve."
"We would like better integration with the cloud because we use a multi-vendor cloud. We use AWS, which is fine, but we also use Azure and Google. We would like better plugins to those other two providers."
"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."
"The biggest room for improvement would be the customizability of the alerting function. The emails that come through are somewhat difficult to tailor along with the information contained within them and how they are laid out."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The licensing is quite expensive for our company."
"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."
"The predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps."
"The pricing: It's expensive."
"The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper."
"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise62
Large Enterprise278
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?
Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...
What advice do you have for others considering OpenNebula?
I recommend it, especially if you need a management interface for a small to medium private cloud. I would rate OpenNebula an eight out of ten.
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.