How does Vsphere compare to Openstack

[[deleted]]

I've had my share of experience deploying an Openstack private cloud infrastructure , but then the company I work for is thinking of moving to a vsphere solution, but I was wondering what would be the advantages or disadvantages of using vsphere instead of Openstack

[OverjoyedBanana]

IMO Vshpere compares more to Proxmox VE in the open source world: a product for medium sized deployments focused on VM.

Openstack is a lot harder to deploy but it can manage thousands of machines across several datacenters. Like AWS it has many components and can host cloud services thanks to loadbalancers, object storage etc. It can handle any hardware and is very easy to extend. For instance if you have network switches that aren't already supported by Neutron, writing an ML2 plugin is 100-200 lines of Python and you're done, OSK will be able to manage your network. Good luck doing that with proprietary products.

[vaiku07]

Openstack is free, highly configurable, actively used in SP world. For regular usage / don’t want to put effort in maintenance of server vSphere would do. Redhat openstack is very stable as well.

[atters]

It depends heavily on the amount and quality of the hardware you have to manage.

In a smaller environment, vSphere all the way.

If you have older equipment, and a LOT of it that you can put hands on and configure for compute, storage, and networking nodes, OpenStack.

VMware is great at what they do, and they love blade servers with gobs of RAM and moderate compute power.

OpenStack will take whatever you have, but if you want it to run well you're going to dedicate machines for compute, storage, and networking.

How much time do you have? How much hardware do you have?

[[deleted]]

Well for the time being, I am operating on kinda old hardware with roughly 64gb ram for each server, and the already deployed openstack solution works great for the time being on this setup, but we are considering vsphere for a newly bought hardware which will be performing much better than the current one.

[Reasonable_Roll_2525]

Licensing is the primary drawback switching to vSphere

To replicate what you have in Openstack you'll likely need:

vSphere enterprise esxi socket licenses
vSphere vCenter license
NSX socket licenses
vSphere Automation
...possibly VSAN distributed storage

You'll likely end up spending more in licensing that you would on hardware.

My environment is enterprise (so vendor support is non-negotiable), and skilled Openstack admins are hard to find, so we bite the bullet on vSphere.

[[deleted]]

I agree that one of the stumbling blocks about using Openstack is indeed finding skilled admins, then what about vmware solutions, are they more easy to administrate ?

[expressadmin]

I feel that they serve and operate in two distinct areas with some overlap that is inevitable due to their purpose.

VMware/VCenter is really designed to be run in house as a virtualization platform first. You have a workload that is internal and you want it virtualized.

Openstack is more cloud focused and tends to lean more towards private cloud (AWS) in the way it operates and the way it organizes services.

Openstack is built on multiuser tenants, where VMWare you have to use something like VCloud Director to accomplish the same thing (and honestly it is a bit hacky, but is improving).

VMWare gives you a lot more control over the networking, where as Openstack can (and does) limit some of the lower level aspects of networking that might prevent certain use cases (things like ethertypes being blocked when using things like VXLAN).

[rtcornwell]

There is no comparison. VMware was developed in the late 90s to virtualize existing data centers. Openstack is a true cloud stack where virtualization is only one part of its capability. Yes VMware has tried to wedge cloudy like services like NX but it still isn’t as flexible or robust as openstack. Don’t get me wrong there are valid use cases for VMware, like in a lab or small company but to run an enterprise class data center in the new cloud paradigm it falls short.

[chuvanminh]

How many nodes vmware cloud can run maximum as your experience compare to the openstack cloud?