SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

SolarWinds and Broadcom are both solutions in the Virtualization Management Tools category. SolarWinds is ranked #7, while Broadcom is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. SolarWinds holds a 10.1% mindshare in VM, compared to Broadcom’s 27.1% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds Virtualization M...

Read 7 SolarWinds Virtualization Manager reviews

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662 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 376 VMware Aria Operations reviews

7,096 Views
2,909 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Virtualization M...

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager compete in the virtualization management space. VMware Aria Operations is favored for its integration and analytics capabilities, while SolarWinds Virtualization Manager stands out for its ease of use and specialized virtualization features.

Features: VMware Aria Operations provides robust performance optimization, automation features, and dynamic threshold monitoring that leverages historical data to set performance baselines. Its integration with multiple cloud platforms offers unified visibility and advanced predictive analytics for capacity management. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager delivers simplicity in virtual machine performance insights, capacity planning tools, and customizable dashboards, making it efficient for targeted virtualization management.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance its user interface for easier navigation and reduce deployment complexity, especially for smaller organizations. It also requires improvement in reporting granularity. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager could benefit from deeper integration with third-party tools, more comprehensive analytics, and broader support for heterogeneous virtual environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations requires meticulous planning but provides extensive resources and customer support for complex environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is quicker to deploy with an emphasis on user-friendliness, offering efficient customer support specifically tailored for virtualization concerns.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations, while potentially entailing higher setup costs, offers substantial ROI for businesses requiring broad IT management functionalities. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager presents a cost-effective solution with solid ROI for enterprises primarily focused on virtualization management, valued for its affordability and efficiency.

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

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 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

SolarWinds Virtualization M...

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

7th

Average Rating

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

376

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is 10.1%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 27.1%, down from 34.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Virtualization Management Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations	27.1%
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager	10.1%
Other	62.8%

Virtualization Management Tools

Featured Reviews

Ravi Khanchandani

Founder Director at Techsa Services

Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

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

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."

"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."

"It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues."

"It has great charts and graphs which provide a high level overview of our environment. Being able to click through those to deep dive, we can easily get to the information that we are looking for."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"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 system dashboards allow us to drill down into systems and find how they are talking to each other. They allow us to fix issues quickly and easily for the end user."

"One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature."

"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."

"The last two versions of it, we've gone with the integrated, high-availability built into the product, and that was a welcome change for us. It's even better now not having to have any kind of load-balancer in front of it..."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."

"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."

"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."

"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."

"User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do and getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging."

"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."

"It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time."

"If you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Automation should be a bit more intuitive."

"Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have."

"I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports."

"In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."

"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."

"The pricing is a little bit expensive. Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved."

"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."

"It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues. With our customized dashboards, we can target issues and attribute them to the correct team."

"The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable."

"vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, 'No, I don't think we need this.' From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But 'expensive' is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, 'It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment.'"

"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."

"VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Healthcare Company

Non Profit

Energy/Utilities Company

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	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	64
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	278

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is essential in a virtualization environment, and Virtualization Manager, or VMAN as i...

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What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

We predominantly work with financial organizations such as large banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies, as well as IT-enabled services (ITES). I use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager at o...

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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...

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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Veeam Data Platform vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 15% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 11% of the time

Dell OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 7% of the time

Savision Cloud Reporter vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 6% of the time

More SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 13% 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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Virtualization Management Tools

January 2026

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager report

Download SolarWinds Virtualization Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

SolarWinds VMAN

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

Overview

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager reduces downtime by 53% and time spent troubleshooting by 59%. Analyze and remediate VM performance problems by viewing active, critical, and warning issues in your environment.

SolarWinds

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

Elliot Health System

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

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations

December 2025

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