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OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

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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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
7th
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 April 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 7.7%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 8.5%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
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.
Gaurav Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enabled us to cut the cost of resources and manage our infrastructure with a smaller team
There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of. Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"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."
"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 is quite easy to deploy."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."
"It's intuitive and user-friendly, especially with the new clients. It's really nice. It's really easy to use. The HTML 5 client is light years ahead of the old one. Everything runs faster, it loads a lot quicker, it's a lot cleaner, the UI is easier to navigate."
"The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them."
"It has also definitely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. The fact that it gives us that single pane of glass to look for stuff, that's the first stop whenever we start troubleshooting."
"The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible."
"VMware provides good support. We are a GSS customer which means that we have global support with a dedicated engineer from VMware's side so we have no issues with support."
"The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features."
"We receive an overview from the dashboard of what is happening in our environment."
"It's a great tool for monitoring and tracking data of our entire environment."
 

Cons

"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly. They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the systems."
"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."
"When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies."
"I would like to have more documentation, in the form of knowledge bases, that better explain the technology, related products, and what the capabilities are."
"The prebuilt dashboards are easy to use, but if you want to create your own, it is not so easy. It is the same for reports."
"It is user-friendly although there's always room for improvement. In the beginning, it was about figuring out where you can find what, but once you know it, it becomes easier to navigate."
"It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information."
"I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license."
"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 predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps."
"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."
"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."
"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
"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."
"Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here. I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
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...
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 y...
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 compl...
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 i...
 

Also Known As

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

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
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 2025.
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