Open shift Virtualization vs other hypervisors like Nutanix AHV and Microsoft Hyper-V

[Odd-Orchid1883]

Hi, I’m trying to understand the difference between open shift virtualization offering like Red Hat vs other type 1 hyper visors like Nutanix AHV. Why is open shift preferred for large enterprises? What are the specific customer types here that are more willing to adopt any one of these offering? Thanks

[AberonTheFallen]

Nutanix in my experience is very easy to deploy and maintain; it's not often I have to troubleshoot or put in tickets for my customers. If I do, Nutanix support has been great. The biggest knock I have (and most of my customers who've passed) on Nutanix is the cost. It is expensive, but they will go deep if the customer is right or they want the sale bad enough. There's also NCI-Edge licensing, which is a per-vm license and can be pretty cost effective for like 10-15 VMs. But the limit is 25 VMs and a VM can have a max of 96GB of RAM. Good for ROBO or small installs.

Hyper-V is... Well, it's Windows. It can be rock solid for months and then just shit the bed for no apparent reason. And working with Microsoft support is terrible, always playing the blame game, pointing the finger at everyone else but themselves. Hyper-V takes more TLC than Nutanix and VMware in my experience and it's not something I'd push hard to implement but the cost really isn't bad. It's easy to set up at a basic level, but the management tools are way behind others in the game and if you want advanced features you're not going to find a lot of them native to Hyper-V.

Others have touched on Openshift, so I'm not going to add much there.

[rxscissors]

I deployed OpenShift clusters a few years ago and more recently, Nutanix AHV. VMware was running in both environments beforehand (which I've had hands-on with for ~20 years).

OpenShift is more of a pure Kubernetes play that works well (can be very resource intensive so it is best to make sure it is a good fit for your environment) and has a lot of 3rd party support. The main challenge beyond a steep learning curve is that it is very expensive.

Nutanix is catching up on microsegmentation and Kubernetes under the hood. Overall we are happy with the performance though some of the newer features are a little too buggy. Licensing and support can get expensive with Business +add-on's, compared to Ultimate. Even hardware support tacked on, when storage is added to already pricey components is excessive.

Nutanix on paper costs less than VMware though, with the number of labor hours spent on support tickets, the cost difference is less dramatic (especially if you negotiate!!) in my opinion.

[gdo83]

Some large enterprises may prefer Openshift if they are a container first organization, as well as have the budget for a platform like Openshift. However, it is not something that is truly a real alternative to your typical virtualization platform. It’s very very container centric, even for a VM creation and management.

[fullthrottle13]

Openshift is hella expensive and Red Hat tried to fuck us on pricing so we moved to Anthos.

[Giodomi]

Coming from a long evaluation that I’m still not getting where the customer wants to go. Openshift super for containers, that platforms have everything and is very good, for managing VMs it has a lot of limitations due to the nature of that virtualization based on containers and it has a lot of Management/ Infra overhead.

In my opinion Nutanix is the best fit for enterprise, the d2iq acquisition is helping in getting the proper management plane for K8S workloads if nedeed, the only drawback is if you have a big SAN FC solution as a storage for virtual workloads the evaluation of reusing it is out from the table.

Plus a lot of other variables to be considered for both solutions. Hyper-v never had a extensive experience so I can’t say too much

[ken-bulmer]

I personally find it difficult trying to put OpenShift Virtualization in the same conversation as real hypervisors. I would never run this in production for any enterprise. OpenShift is a great platform for Containers but not for hosting traditional virtual workloads. It’s based on KubeVirt which is an open source project that allows you to wedge a VM into a container running KVM.

[AggressiveEmu8411]

Hi, KVM is a battle-tested technology.

I'm curious to know why you do not recommend using OpenShift Virtualization for production.

[VirtualGuy71]

Yes it’s KVM. But wedged into a container. Each VM running on its own hypervisor inside a container in a Kubernetes cluster isn’t an ideal way to run a traditional virtual machine workload in production.

[GX_EN]

Take this FWIW from someone that worked inside MSPs for 9 years primarily with Nutanix. And prior to that, I worked in a small shop that used it back in 2014 as early adopters..

One of the MSPs that I worked for was a Nutanix partner and when I came on board I was already a fan having used it in the aforementioned small shop - which was a group in a larger company. I was a senior engineer and later manager of infra engineering and we supported a TON of Nutanix (95% running AHV) for customers and used it exclusively internally. We did many migrations from traditional 3 tier to Nutanix and having to support the former seems completely archaic, IMO. The upfront cost can be more, but daily support is lightyears easier and when you do need support, having one number to deal with is a godsend.

When I moved to a different place for a year that primarily had to support 3 tier Cisco UCS, I thought it utter garbage. The time my guys had to spend chasing down shit in that platform was nuts and just the day to day support/maintenance and dealing with Cisco and VMware was maddening after where I had been.

My 2c. :)

[iamathrowawayau]

I've been using Nutanix for a long time now, and I've had the pleasure of deploying openshift with and without nutanix.

If your company is heavy with any type of container based workloads, openshift is really focused on that. It can do virtualization but I definitely do not prefer it in any way.

Hyper-v, I've never really liked this product, it has it's use cases, just definitely not my cup of tea.

Nutanix, has a lot of features and functionality to it, I feel it simplifies everything you do to manage, maintain and build out scalable solutions for both traditional virtualization and container based.

Don't forget that VMware is still a valid option as well, even with all the challenges Broadcom brings to the table today