SELECT RED HAT VS.
VMWARE
WHEN BUILDING A PRIVATE CLOUD
COMPETITIVE REVIEW
“ We evaluated Red Hat
Cloud Infrastructure
to be one of the most
versatile and complete
cloud solutions
available.”
PROFESSOR YENG CHAI SOH
FOUNDING DIRECTOR, HIGH
PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CENTER,
NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL
UNIVERSITY
“ The flexibility of
the private cloud
solution, the ability
to understand our
business drivers and
assist in formulating
a solution, the level of
engagement, and the
execution and diligence
to meeting our needs
are the reasons why we
consider Red Hat
our partner.”
DANA EDWARDS,
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER,
UNION BANK
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BUSINESS CHALLENGES
Moving business forward requires the intelligent placement of workloads. And finding the
best ways to support those enterprise workloads and innovative, cloud-enabled applications can
empower IT organizations to solve problems now and take advantage of future innovations. That’s
why companies are turning to Red Hat® Cloud Infrastructure. With this one solution, you can build
and manage datacenter solutions for enterprise applications using traditional virtualization, while
providing a path to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private cloud based on OpenStack®.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Organizations like Union Bank are using Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure to support their entire
datacenters — from bare-metal infrastructures to virtualized datacenters to private and hybrid clouds.
Your business can use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite
and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® OpenStack Platform, which comprise Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure,
separately or in combination depending on your business and IT requirements and goals.
Whether you need to reduce costs and increase agility through server virtualization, self-service,
and automation capabilities, or deploy cloud-enabled applications on a vendor-neutral, scalable
cloud solution — or both — Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure can help you.
With these solutions, your business can:
• Easily deploy a secure virtualization foundation that supports traditional enterprise
applications, including Windows workloads.
• Introduce cost-effective virtualization solutions into your environment.
• Simplify the management and operation of your existing virtualized infrastructure with a unified
cloud management platform that lets your IT staff orchestrate workloads across
multiple hypervisors, providers, and private and public clouds with greater visibility and control.
Build a private cloud using a scale-out IaaS model.
• Build a private cloud using a scale-out IaaS model.
• Manage the life cycle of both underlying physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, as well as
Red Hat Enterprise Linux tenant workloads.
 Table 1 compares and contrasts the features and characteristics of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and
VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise.

FEATURE RED HAT CLOUD VMWARE VCLOUD

INFRASTRUCTURE SUITE ENTERPRISE

Key • Open, enterprise-ready solution • Proprietary, enterprise-ready solution

differentiators • All-in-one offering with a single • Multiple levels of functionality sold in
price editions with differing prices
• Bare-metal performance for virtu- • Application high availability
alized applications1 (Enterprise Plus edition only)2
• Prioritized high availability
• Scale-out private cloud based
on OpenStack
• Single pane of glass interface
for managing both traditional
virtualization (Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization and VMware) and
cloud (OpenStack) infrastructures.

Management • Included in a Red Hat • Requires purchase and license of

server Enterprise Virtualization VMware vCenter and database support4
subscription
• Life-cycle systems management of
both underlying cloud and virtual-
ization infrastructure, and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux tenant workloadst

Virtual machine • 40 cores: 4,682@288 result7 • 40 cores: 3,824@234 result7

(VM) density • 160 cores: 14,061@864 result7 • 160 cores: result not available7

Integration • Supports the open Neutron • Supports VMware’s NSX networking

with OpenStack pluggable networking API
technology • Supports the OpenStack image
service for a unified image
repository between virtual
and cloud platforms
plug-in
• Supports the OpenStack image service
through the VMware vCenter driver

redhat.com COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud 2
 FEATURE RED HAT CLOUD VMWARE VCLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE SUITE ENTERPRISE

Other features • Self-service user portal • Self-service user portal

• Supports live migration
for storage
• Supports power savings by
concentrating VMs on fewer hosts
during off-peak hours
• Supports load balancing for
storage
• Offers customized reporting
• Requires the purchase of operations
management editions for live migration
capabilities2
• Requires Enterprise or Enterprise Plus
edition for DPM capabilities5
• Requires the Storage DRS component
included in the operations management
editions6

• Supports chargeback based on the • Requires VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

amount of storage, network, and
CPU resources that are allocated
and used

Related software • Red Hat Storage Server, a soft- • VMware vCloud Automation Center
infrastructure ware-defined storage platform
solutions • Red Hat JBoss® Middleware
portfolio

Table 1. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise feature comparison
1 Comparison based on a benchmark addressing performance evaluation of datacenter servers used in virtualized
server consolidation at www.spec.org as of May 2014. spec.org/virt_sc2010/results/specvirt_sc2010_perf.html. SPEC®
and the benchmark name SPECvirt® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
2 Source: vmware.com/products/vcloud-suite/compare as of May 2014
3 See redhat.com/resourcelibrary/datasheets/RHEV-Desktops-SPICE-Datasheet
4 Source: pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp#com.vmware.vsphere.install.doc_50/GUID-ED4B7EEF-C98E-4873-
9E3F-8039CA4FE234.html
as of May 2014
5 Source: vmware.com/products/vsphere/features-drs-dpm
6 Source: vmware.com/products/vsphere/features-storage-drs
7 Source: SPECvirt_sc2010 results, spec.org/virt_sc2010/results/specvirt_sc2010_perf.html as of June 2014

redhat.com COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud 3
 KEY DIFFERENTIATORS
“ Red Hat offers us There are many advantages to building a distributed elastic cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
a cloud solution that
OpenStack Platform, included in Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, versus a cloud based on traditional
can be integrated virtualization solutions like VMware vCloud software.
with our previous
infrastructure, without RED HAT CLOUD VMWARE VCLOUD SUITE ENTERPRISE
INFRASTRUCTURE
the need to demount
Application • Offers a new application model in • Supports traditional applications that run
what we already had
architecture which applications are stateless in physical and virtual environments
in place to continue and non-persistent • Examples: Enterprise resource
moving forward.” • Sends tasks to background planning (ERP), customer relationship
SARA ISABEL RUBIO, servers and instances using management (CRM), databases, email,
GLOBAL PLATFORMS OPERATION a messaging queue and traditional 3-tier web applications
AND SECURITY, TELEFÓNICA
GLOBAL SOLUTIONS Approach to • Scales out • Scales up
scalability • Automatically instantiates more • Manually increases CPU and memory
servers and instances as load resources (CPU/memory) per instance as
increases load increases

Failure handling • Abstracts failure into open source
application design
• Automatically restarts instances
on a different host in the event of
a hardware failure
• Eliminates the need for backup
instances to run idle and consume
(waste) storage, CPU, and network
resources
• Eliminates the need for clustered
back-end databases
• Manages failures through proprietary
VMware fault-tolerant technology
• Runs a spare VM on a different host,
until needed
• Fails over to the spare VM if the primary
VM fails
• Requires back-end databases to be
synchronized to prevent loss of data

Example • Uses a distributed, stateless • Uses a traditional 3-tier architecture

e-commerce architecture • Requires VMs to be scaled up manually
application • Loads purchases orders into a • Requires a load balancer to be added to
architecture queue help support demand
• Uses background servers that are • Uses expensive, proprietary hardware
dedicated to order processing solutions to meet required service levels
(asynchronous)
• Allows users to continue to
purchase and browse products
on the primary servers
• Automatically instantiates new
instances as demand increases
• Uses commodity hardware
solutions to provide outstanding
services levels

Table 2. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise key differentiators

redhat.com COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud 4
 UNIFIED MANAGEMENT
As companies expand their use of virtual and cloud infrastructures, it’s important for IT
organizations to have visibility into each deployment area. The unified management and advanced
life-cycle management features of Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite offer a consistent set
of capabilities across all infrastructure providers, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack
Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Amazon Web
Services. As a result, your IT organization can implement self-service provisioning, intelligently
place workloads, update and configure the underlying infrastructure and tenant workloads, monitor
capacity and usage, and perform other tasks that are essential to resource optimization — regardless
of location.

Table 3 compares the cloud management features and capabilities of Red Hat CloudForms and
VMware vCloud Automation Center.

RED HAT CLOUDFORMS AND VMWARE VCLOUD

RED HAT SATELLITE AUTOMATION CENTER

Key capabilities • Offers a comprehensive cloud • Offers virtual infrastructure management

management platform capabilities
• Manages multiple hypervisors, • Manages VMware vSphere environments
including Red Hat Enterprise • Uses a multi-step software installation and
Virtualization, VMware vSphere, configuration process1
and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Requires agents to retrieve data2
• Automates and orchestrates
• Requires VMware vCloud Connector to
workflows and processes
connect private and public clouds2
• Scales across datacenters, sites,
and public clouds
• Offers an easy life cycle-manage-
ment process for both underlying
physical, virtual, and cloud infra-
structures and tenant workloads,
including patch management,
configuration management, and
subscription management

Load balance • Works with any load balancer • Requires custom components for load
balancing at the portal3

Installation • Installs one product (CloudForms) • Requires multiple products with different
that supports multiple roles options and configurations3

redhat.com COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud 5
SUPPORT RED HAT CLOUDFORMS AND VMWARE VCLOUD
Red Hat software subscriptions RED HAT SATELLITE AUTOMATION CENTER
include high-quality software Dependencies • None: open source, freedom • Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL
and maintenance along with to choose • Server, VMware vCenter Suite3
information and support
services that span the applica- Support • Linux, PostgreSQL database • Linux, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL
tion infrastructure life cycle. requirements Server,
VMware Single Sign-On, PostgreSQL
When you subscribe, you database3
receive continuous access to Footprint and • Agentless software appliance • Agent-based
all supported versions of the scalability (CloudForms) • 15 workflows per worker (maximum)4
Red Hat software in both binary
• Unlimited, horizontal scaling
and source form, including all
security updates and bug fixes. Availability • Active-active configuration • Active-passive manager service
You can also access Red Hat’s
technical support engineers,
Table 3. R
 ed Hat CloudForms and VMware vCloud Automation Center feature comparison
Knowledgebase, documenta-
1 Source: vmware.com/pdf/vcac-51-installation-guide.pdf
tion, reference architectures,
2 Source: vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vCloud/VMware-vCloud-Suite-Datasheet.pdf
and the award-winning1 Red Hat
3 Source: pubs.vmware.com/vCAC-60/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vcloud-automation-center-60-installation-and-
Customer Portal. configuration.pdf
4 Source: vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-vcloud-automation-center-60-reference-architecture.pdf

redhat.com COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud 6
COMPETITIVE REVIEW  Select Red Hat vs. VMware when building a private cloud

SUMMARY
If your organization is looking for a cost-effective alternative to proprietary-virtualization, IaaS,
and cloud management solutions, consider Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. With it, your organization
can build scale-up virtual datacenter solutions for traditional enterprise applications, or deploy the
foundation for modern, shared-nothing, scale-out cloud infrastructures — or both — and manage it all
with a unified management solution that gives you visibility and control for more efficient operation.
Best of all, you can do all of this with one solution for less than those proprietary alternatives.

LEARN MORE
redhat.com/rhci

“Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure” competitive pricing guide, redhat.com/resourcelibrary/datasheets/

redhat-cloud-infrastructure-pricing-guide

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform support for VMware vCenter” article, access.redhat.
com/site/articles/744153

“British Airways chooses Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to improve IT systems to

build an internal cloud” case study, redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/2/
british-airways-chooses-rhev-to-improve-it-systems-to-build-internal-cloud

“NTU increases efficiency and performance while saving costs with a

hybrid cloud” case study, redhat.com/resourcelibrary/case-studies/
ntu-increases-efficiency-performance-while-saving-costs-with-hybrid-cloud

“Leading Indian financial services firm cuts costs and increases agility with
Red Hat and Intel” case study, redhat.com/resourcelibrary/case-studies/
leading-indian-financial-services-firm-cuts-costs-increases-agility-red-hat-intel

“IDC: OpenStack and Red Hat” analyst paper, engage.redhat.com/content/

outlook-for-openstack-201309131116

ABOUT RED HAT

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, using a community-powered approach
to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux, and middleware technologies.
Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat is an S&P company
with more than 80 offices spanning the globe, empowering its customers’ businesses.

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