Cisco FabricPath vs. Red Hat Virtualization (discontinued)

Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.

Incentivized

Red Hat Virtualization is suitable for small implementation and hosting VMs. However, when you start asking for additional features or enhancements, the engineering team is not the flexible as other engineering teams in Red Hat. It is very likely they will not accept adding features or in the best case. They wouldn't commit to a plan when it is possible to be available.

Incentivized

• It scales fairly well.
• It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
• It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.

Incentivized

• RHV issues/bugs can be reported via Bugzilla to RH support. The service is great and typically responds soon.
• Red Hat distribution integration is seamless as it is integrated into the kernel.
• OpenStack support enables more customized VM templates and network configuration control.

Incentivized

• We've had a few bugs that have caused random reloads of switches when modifying VLANS.
• We've had a bug that reloaded an entire fabric at once.

Incentivized

• Documentation of RHEV needs more improvement.
• RHEV GUI needs a lot of improvements in some versions of RHEV, GUI will not work properly (shows incorrect details of VM ).
• Need fast rollout of patch releases.
• Need good linux Knowledge to manage the RHEVM.

Incentivized

In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.

Incentivized

Red Hat Virtualization is the best enterprise-level virtualization software for an organization that needs cost-effective and flexible solutions for its environment. We can easily integrate RHEV with other Red Hat software like OpenStack...etc. RHEV is highly customizable software, which helps us to customize our environment. Since RHEV is an open-source tool, we can install it on any hardware. There is no proprietary dependency.

Incentivized

• FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.

Incentivized

• It has had an extremely positive impact on my overall business and has allowed me to utilize and leverage it as an offering to my clients.
• It's an extremely solid, robust, and reliable product built off of KVM Virtualization technology.
• Less expensive solution than VMware and includes more features!

Incentivized