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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
21st
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 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 Operations is 3.7%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations3.7%
OpenNebula1.6%
Other94.7%
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

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"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."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."
"I can go back a little bit, a week or a month, look at the history, to troubleshoot."
"Initial setup was straightforward; it was very simple, right out of the box it worked."
"VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated."
"The built-in dashboards for troubleshooting are nice."
"The value from vROps, from a traditional sense that we had, is the visibility into the back-end, to know when we are having issues with VMs before it actually becomes an end user issue."
"Using the solution for capacity allocation and management has also helped us to save on hardware costs, by about 20 percent."
"It's very easy to use and very stable. Scaling up for future use will be no issue with this solution."
"It gives you a better understanding of your VM environment, the sizing of VMs, whether they are properly sized, and provides a central plain glass to see your environment."
 

Cons

"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"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."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"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."
"When we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions... We have some 3000 applications."
"Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial."
"I'm a very core systems admin guy, so what I would like to look at, when I see DRS migrations, it would be interesting to see why it really migrated."
"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."
"I think their support has some challenges. I've had better support from other vendors, to be honest."
"Honestly, I don't think it's as good as it used to be. I think it's gone downhill a little bit."
"We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex."
 

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."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for."
"It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems."
"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."
"Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."
"The solution is costly."
"Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly."
"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing 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 Business66
Midsize Enterprise61
Large Enterprise281
 

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...
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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.