OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

OpenNebula and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.5, while Broadcom is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. OpenNebula holds a 3.7% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 4.9% 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

2,852 Views
2,738 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 376 VMware Aria Operations reviews

7,096 Views
4,116 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and OpenNebula compete in the cloud management category. Based on the data, VMware Aria Operations has the upper hand due to its advanced analytics and predictive insights specifically tailored for VMware environments.

Features: VMware Aria Operations is distinguished by real-time analytics, integration with vCenter/ESXI, and dynamic thresholds, which provide predictive insights into VMware environments. It offers capacity management and proactivity through detailed metrics for issue prevention. OpenNebula, meanwhile, is noted for its flexibility and adaptability across various platforms while being less specialized in VMware contexts.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance user engagement by simplifying its reporting features and improving the user interface for beginners. Additionally, expanding integration capabilities with third-party tools would extend its applicability beyond VMware. OpenNebula needs to improve its documentation and customer support for clearer communication. Of note, the platform would benefit from more robust community backing and quicker feature updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations supports on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud deployments, with a recognized strong technical support network. However, reaching advanced support levels could be improved. OpenNebula is favored for its straightforward setup for on-premises and public cloud deployments, but it requires clearer communication channels and faster customer support response times.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations is on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, making it more appealing to larger enterprises with specific VMware needs, substantiated by a significant ROI in environments heavily utilizing VMware. OpenNebula offers a cost-effective open-source alternative with lower upfront and operational costs, making it desirable for budget-conscious scenarios, albeit with some limitations in advanced features compared to VMware Aria Operations.

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

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations

December 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

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

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

376

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 3.7%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 4.9%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations	4.9%
OpenNebula	3.7%
Other	91.4%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

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.

Read full review

AldoDomini

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.

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

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

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

"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."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"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."

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

More OpenNebula pros

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."

"What we do, as a whole for our group... is storage virtualization and the compute side. This product brings all those pieces into one interface and now we can actually correlate data between them."

"It gives the real-time info that we need to diagnose any problems that we have with our VDI infrastructure."

"I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit."

"The alerting feature would be the most valuable feature for us. It gathers more metrics. In the latest versions, there are metrics that are being exactly captured with vCenter which are a bit better. Aside for that it provides a historical analysis of metrics over time."

"The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year."

"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."

"They keep improving and updating their apps over time."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"They should add more features like object storage."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"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."

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

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."

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

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

"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."

More OpenNebula cons

"The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex."

"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."

"One area that needs improvement is the solution's connectivity and integration with other products, such as IBM and Huawei servers and storage."

"We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end."

"They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps."

"There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware."

"I would like to see improvements in managing within a single cluster - managing DRS a lot better as far as utilization of each host goes, within a single cluster. That would make it comparable to VMTurbo (Turbonomic). That has that feature where you can also manage it within a single cluster, move workloads around to balance out the hosts."

"We have an Enterprise Plus license, so there's a long list of stuff that you get with the Enterprise Plus license, and I'd like to see a better integration of all the vRealize components."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The billing is complicated because every country has a different option. Here in Chile, we don't pay for this kind of service with the Chilean pesos. We use another currency. In the future, I think vROps needs to work with governments for a native solution."

"The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."

"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."

"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."

"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."

"The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

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	64
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	278

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 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 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...

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

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 34% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat CloudForms vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 13% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

January 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

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 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.

Broadcom

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

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. VMware Aria Operations

December 2025

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