Battle Beyond Virtualization Part-1

With the release of VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, The new war has kicked off in comprehensive Management/Monitoring/Automation and Orchestration space by Microsoft & VMware. VMware released 5.1 after Microsoft announced Windows 2012 with all new exciting features. VMware answer to MS release was to discontinue RAM based licensing. Yes correctly heard, VMware is back to CPU based licensing.

VMware did more  they added features like storage vMotion, Hot Add, Fault Tolerance and vShield Zones to the vSphere 5.1 Standard Edition with no extra charge. These features were previously available in more expensive editions. VMware also added their DR tool vSphere Replication to Essentials Plus and higher editions with no extra charge

Having said that lets evaluate Microsoft & VMware offerings in private cloud space. Let’s first take a look at Private cloud attributes by Microsoft. This was presented during WPC 2012 in June. I am going to evaluate Both Vendors on these attributes.

1. Pooled Resources:-

This is primarily about resource aggregation & maintains sufficient resources to fulfill    any on demand request. So what is the definition of resource? is it just limited to compute? 

Nope...we are talking about pooling storage/Network & Security Stacks as well. 

Microsoft: -

Microsoft resource pooling is primarily done at SCVMM level where you can define pools of Hyper-v Cluster, IP/MAC address, Storage & VIP with load Balancers. New service Modeling has been introduced which is being seen as a good value proposition while defining service types/catalog etc. Hyper-v Cluster can scale up to 64 Nodes which I think will give you massive aggregated CPU & RAM capacity however resource aggregation is still not modular. Following diagram shows logical representation of aggregated/Pooled resource which is called Cloud Object in SCCM 2012

VMware:-

VMware has different strategy, they further abstract virtual resources and aggregate those into something called vDC (Virtual Data Centers).  RAM/CPU/Network & Storage is aggregated at Virtual center level and called as vDC further those vDCs are aggregated as resource at vCloud Director. vCloud directory has several other roles which is not in the scope of today’s discussion. Following diagram shows Logical representation of resource aggregation in VMware.

Conclusion: - I think Microsoft solution is good for SMB Customer’s because of single layer aggregation whereas VMware can scale up and produce massive pooled resources, which makes it suitable for Enterprise customers and service providers. Although VMware only supports cluster size up to 32 Nodes however due to 2 layer aggregation they can produce huge capacity.

2. Self-Service

Self service capability is a critical business driver that enables members of an organization to become more agile in responding to business needs with IT capabilities to meet those needs in a manner that aligns and conforms with internal business IT requirements and governance. This means the interface between IT and the business are abstracted to simple, well defined and approved set of options that are presented as a menu in a portal or available from the command line. The business selects these services from the catalog, begins the provisioning process and is notified upon completion, the business is then only charged for what is actually used. 

Microsoft: -

Microsoft offers self-service portal along with SCVMM. SSP runs as web service and can be installed on VMM server however Microsoft recommends that you should install it on separate machine to have better performance.

VMware: -

VMware offers self-service portal along with vCloud Director, which does more or less what Microsoft SSP can do. I have evaluated both Vendors on few parameters which I think are essential.

Parameter	Microsoft	VMware
Design Workflow	Yes	Yes
Role Based Provisioning	Yes	Yes
Catalog Templates	Yes	Yes
Extensible	Yes	Yes
Integration with Orchestration	Yes (Works well with Opalis)	Yes
Allows partners to extend functionality	Yes	Yes

Conclusion: - No significant difference. I think both offerings are equally good.

I hope this post was informative. I will talk about other attributes in Next post..

Cheers!!

Pankaj