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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
6th
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
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
374
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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Amar Sorro - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"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."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"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 solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"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 one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment."
"It gives the real-time info that we need to diagnose any problems that we have with our VDI infrastructure."
"What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management. I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well. I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh."
"This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up, to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward."
"We have all the information that we need in one place and don't have to search for our monitoring tools everywhere."
"It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines."
"A central dashboard for evaluating the health of our whole vCenter environment."
"I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers."
 

Cons

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"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 front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"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."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."
"The integration points can use improvement. We currently use a lot of third-party management packs to get insights for SQL, HP or Dell EMC. If we could have more integration built in as a standard feature that would make it slightly better."
"One of the things that we've been limited on is that it only monitors one cluster at a time. We're spread out all across the US. It would be nice to monitor multiple clusters from one instance. That would be the main thing we'd like to see."
"If Aria could send alerts when a specific system or VM is using excessive resources, we could consult the storage team to address the problem proactively."
"I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information."
"I want vROps to have wider compatibility with older hardware. In this country, many companies have older hardware, so sometimes we can't support all the newest features."
"One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about."
"I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"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 would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
"Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
"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."
"The product is too expensive to implement."
"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."
"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."
"The solution has helped to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues."
"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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.
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'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: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.