OpenStack vs VMware vCloud

Topics

● IT Managers Important Points
● OpenStack Pro/Cons
● VMware Pro/Cons
● Technical Compare
● Non-technical Compare
● Who Should Use OpenStack ?
● Who Should Use VMware ?

IT Managers Important Points

The important points for IT managers in organizations and companies to
manage infrastructure services are:
● Easy to use
● Management tools & Optional web interfaces
● Easy to find skills and support
● Entry cost and maintenance, The lower the better
● Integration with other platforms
● Other points by you

OpenStack Pro/Cons

The advantage of OpenStack by our experiences at innfinision:
● The most successful Open Source project after Linux kernel
● Support from many OEMs and OS vendors
● Interoperability with many components, just pick your favorite one and plug it in
● Standard and well accepted APIs

The disadvantage of OpenStack by our experiences at innfinision:
● Very complex to setup and troubleshoot
● Although common code base, might differ from implementations
● Need high numbers of management nodes
● High skills required to run the cluster

VMware vCloud Pro/Cons

The advantage of VMware vCloud by our experiences at innfinision and
our customers advises:
● Feature rich (vSphere HA, vMotion, DRS, I/O control)
● Very large ecosystems
● All os vendors make it supported and certified under ESXi

● ESXi can be downloaded and used freely

The disadvantage of VMware vCloud by our experiences at innfinision and
our customers advises:
● Per core license - expensive
● Proprietary platform
● ESXi can not be APIs accessed - need to buy licenses
● Most of applications are based on Windows

OpenStack at a Glance

VMware vCloud at a Glance

Technical Compare

Hypervisor:
● OpenStack supports variants of hypervisor and container such as KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XEN, Docker, LXC

● VMware vCloud suppors ESXi as the only and default hypervisor

Customer and operations access :
● OpenStack native dashboard, 3rd parties dashboards, CLI
● VMware Windows clients, vCloud Director (EOL’d)

Storage:
● OpenStack Default non-persistent images. Pluggable Cinder:block volumes, Ceph, Several vendor SAN
● VMware VMFS over SAN and iSCSI

Network:
● Traditional switching and Software Defined Network
● VMware traditional switching infrastructure, SDN with additional products

Image management:
● OpenStack Glance Image Service, support all popular image formats
● VMware Catalogs & templates, OVF import

Management System:
● Nova (Cluster Controller)
● VMware vCenter

High Availability:
● Nova for VMs HA; OpenStack HA project for infrastructure components
● VMware vCenter Heartbeat

APIs:
● For OpenStack based on Open REST APIs, compatibility with Amazon EC2 & S3
● For VMware is Proprietary, mostly only under Perl and Powershell

Non-technical Compare

Costs:
● For OpenStack everything is free but Some might charge for a maintenance fee for enterprise support

● In VMware the costs contains License + Maintenance fee

Industries :
● OpenStack is for cloud management platform for large providers, carriers and large outsourcers
● VMware is for virtualization for enterprises

Skills:
● For OpenStack high-end skills required, including system and network
● For VMware, basic system administration is needed

Expansion :
● No actual limitation on OpenStack (might be handy create different Availability Zones)
● Max 32 physical nodes on VMware vCloud, though not recommended

Migration:
● OpenStack any to any through built-in qemu tools
● VMware converter for P2V and other virtualization formats

Flexibility:
● OpenStack primarily created for Linux, Windows supported on the same infrastructure
● Great guest OS support and large ecosystem on VMware vCloud

Who Should Use OpenStack ?

If you are a large company or ISP with hundreds of VMs and networks being destroyed and created daily and have budget of having more than 15 physical nodes to start, go for OpenStack

Who Should Use VMware ?

If you need certified traditional workloads (ex: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, ...) and you have money and also you want all the point-and-click features, this is a no-brainer decision go for VMware

Layers of Latency: Cloud Complexity and Performance

The cloud has enabled enterprises to dramatically improve how they operate their businesses, bringing information and applications to every corner of the globe and freeing up storage space as big data grows in popularity and volume.

Within the cloud, users can access applications from literally anywhere in the world, requiring only an Internet connection, and applications can be housed across multiple data centers sprinkled around the globe. Because of the flexibility and availability that the cloud offers, more than 30 percent of enterprises worldwide use at least one cloud-based solution. What’s more, cloud revenue is expected to grow 500 percent from 2010 to 2020 as cloud applications and companies multiply and expand.

Despite the cloud opening so many possibilities, it is not always able to deliver on performance demands, sometimes leading to subpar end user experiences. For example, research from Google Chrome executive Mike Belshe found that 20 milliseconds of network latency can result in a 15 percent decrease in page load time. Other studies from Amazon and Google found that a half-second delay causes a 20 percent drop in traffic on Google, and a one tenth of a second delay can lower Amazon’s sales by 1 percent. Clearly, latency is not only a nuisance, but also a serious problem for enterprises that house their applications in the cloud.

To mitigate the growing effects of latency, it’s important to understand what causes it, as well as how enterprises can reduce it. With both the Internet and cloud computing playing a role in how we share and access applications, latency is far more complicated than one might suspect. Prior to the arrival of the Internet, latency was defined simply by the number of router hops required for data to travel from origin to destination. Enterprises, for the most part, owned their network and all its components. So, packets would have to travel the distance between two computers or servers, resulting in more latency for transfers that involved more hops.

Today, most networks are broken down into hundreds — if not thousands — of components that are each owned, operated and managed by different entities. Therefore, enterprises often do not have insight into the performance of their network, let alone the ability to optimize its performance or reduce latency. Often labeled as distributed computing, this scenario means that if even one server out of hundreds is experiencing latency, cloud application users will see slower load times and halted performance.

Compounding the effects of distributed computing, virtualization adds another layer of complexity to cloud latency. Once a simple storage warehouse for rack-mounted servers, today’s data centers are a complex web of hypervisors running dozens upon dozens of virtual machines. Within this forest of virtualized network infrastructure, servers often incur packet delays before data even leaves the rack itself.

Because these widespread and complex networks are increasingly common in today’s world, many connectivity providers now provide service level agreements, or SLAs, that outline a minimum level of service and guaranteed network performance. Service providers of all types, whether telecom or cloud, work very hard to uphold the minimums outlined within their SLA. However, when it comes to cloud transactions conducted over the Internet, service providers often don’t establish SLAs. This is largely because cloud latency is such a new phenomenon and connectivity providers are still working out how they can ensure strong uptime for cloud applications, not to mention what levels to set.

It’s clear that these three factors — intricate networks, virtualization and a lack of SLA standards — create extremely unpredictable and unregulated service levels. However, the problem is not necessarily latency, but the unpredictability of it. To overcome this unpredictability, enterprises need to establish a baseline for performance and then keep as many cloud applications as possible performing to that level. Only then can they work to reduce it.

Many have found that establishing a direct connect to a public cloud is one way to help reduce the cloud’s unpredictability. These connections are offered by many leading cloud companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), to enable a connection between an enterprise’s network and the public cloud without involving hundreds of other servers or virtual machines. This essentially means that an enterprise can set up its own lane in which cloud applications travel back and forth to the home network. As a result, cloud traffic is no longer subject to the unpredictability of the general Internet and performance becomes far more calculable. Performance metrics for these services follow strict quality of service guarantees as these “cloud onramps” are seen as a key offering within cloud providers’ solutions.

Outages and latency continually remind us that the cloud is not perfect. Despite the high performance capabilities of the cloud, we must keep in mind that this is very new technology and both users and providers are still trying to work out the kinks to establish steady service levels. However, the first step to achieving a low-latency, high-performing cloud is identifying the causes of performance degradation. From there, we can only move onwards and upwards — into the cloud.

https://itechglide.com

VMware vs OpenStack: Public and Private Cloud Reality Check

When it comes to OpenStack vs VMware in private clouds and public clouds, make sure you're aware of the facts and asking the right questions. Here's the misinformation and a reality check.

When it comes to OpenStack vs VMware, a lot of misinformation is floating around the web. Read the headlines, and you might think OpenStack (the open source cloud platform) competes head-on against VMware's vSphere hypervisor. But that isn't  exactly the case. Here's the reality check, including recent thoughts from VMware Executive VP Raghu Raghuram.

The background: In recent weeks, published reports suggested PayPal (owned by eBay) would dump VMware for OpenStack. But VMware strongly disputed the report, and PayPal has also distanced itself from such assertions. What's the truth?

Here's The VAR Guy's spin:

OpenStack is a public and private cloud platform. It supports multiple hypervisors -- including VMware vSphere, KVM (kernel-based virtualization) and more.

It's safe to say hundreds of companies are currently testing OpenStack. Big proponents include Dell, HP, IBM and Rackspace. But that doesn't mean they will go live with OpenStack in all scenarios. For those that do deploy OpenStack, they will still need a hypervisor. That means choosing between VMware, KVM and more.

Instead of competing head-on against VMware's vSphere hypervisor, OpenStack is more logically positioned against VMware's vCloud Suite.

"vCloud gives you everything you need in an integrated approach," said Raghu Raghuram, executive VP of cloud infrastructure and management at VMware. "OpenStack is a piecemeal apporach. The service provider has to assembile it all together." Raghuram made that statement to The VAR Guy during the VMware Partner Exchange summit in February 2013.

VMware's own Hybrid Cloud initiative (which will include a VMware Public Cloud) will not run OpenStack. Some critics are concerned about that market reality, but The VAR Guy offered his two cents here.

Your Next Moves

For channel partners and cloud integrators, it's important to keep OpenStack momentum stories in perspective. Whenever a major technology shift occurs (mainframe, PCs, client-server, Internet, cloud...), you'll always see first-mover migration stories. Take a closer look and most of the migrations involve a specific application or IT department, rather than a wholescale rip-and-replace transition.

No doubt, OpenStack is generating buzz out there. And the buzz will get louder at the OpenStack Summit (April 15-18, Portalnd, Oregon). You'll also start to see more OpenStack training and certification programs for channel partners and integrators. But OpenStack's potential success doesn't spell certain doom for VMware.

Here is my reality check.

Hypervisors are just one strategy to muli-tenancy. VShere is not cloud. Cloud is not simply the next step past virtualization. Cloud is a transformation to services. Big difference technically and organizationally. VCloud is more closely compared to OpenStack. Like Linux OpenStack will garnish a portion (large perhaps) of the market. Developers drive innovation, developers prefer freedom and choice. They have chosen OpenStack.

You don't have to have a SI to be successful with OpenStack now - See Metacloud. F100 companies are in production with OpenStack. At significant cost advantage to VCloud with functional parity - Enterprises not looking at OpenStack will wake-up one day feeling left behind as there competitors deliver more cost effective agile solutions with the best developers choosing to work on OpenStack verse alternatives.

Little more..

OpenStack is an open Source project, like Apache and Linux before it. That is both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. OpenStack is under three years old and it is already the biggest Open Source project ever. The others took 25 years to get to where they are today. OpenStack is a set of tools built from the ground up to support large scale clouds. Its main competition is not VMware, its Amazon.

VMWare is and will always remain a proprietary product that started life as an application used for cutting the costs of maintaining test/dev environments. Its greatest strength is that it is a monolithic virtualization hypervisor. The tools, until recently, are still mostly infrastructure and administrative focused. Yes, vCloud is getting there, but it is no more integrated than the OpenStack tools. VMWare had a few year jump on developing the technology, but it is so embedded in the Enterprise, it missed what was going on outside.

https://itechglide.com