Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation vs. ManageEngine OpManager

Eco4Cloud is well suited in VMware farms that have standard VM deployments, especially with small VMs, with nothing blocking vMotion and hardware fully compatible with IPMI 2.0 (minimum). It doesn't work well if many VMs are nodes in a Microsoft cluster because they would be unmovable and therefore their host would never be put in stand-by mode. If every host in the cluster has at least one guest VM that is a node of a Microsoft cluster, no host in the cluster will ever be put in stand-by mode.

Manage Engine OpManager is better suited to serve server and network admins at organization to monitor their servers and network devices. It helps us with compliance with the reports available like utilization reports and capacity planning reports. It helps you to keep track of what all process are consuming the resources. It helps you in monitoring what is happening in your switches, routers and firewall

Incentivized

• It consolidates workloads in VMware clusters using an algorithm that seems to work better than VMware DRS. It keeps headroom for workload peaks and to withstand the number of host failures set for the cluster in vCenter.
• If the workload is very variable, Eco4Cloud will not continuously turn a host on and off but it will settle to keep the host running. It sort of "rightsizes" the cluster keeping only the right number of hosts running. This is another main difference when comparing Eco4Cloud with VMware DRS/DPM which strictly follows the workload and sometimes isn't fast enough in turning on the hosts when the workload is ramping-up.
• To do a good job Eco4Cloud needs to analyze the hosts and the VMs. Therefore, the troubleshooting component of Eco4Cloud can figure out if there are problems in the configuration of the hosts (e.g. vMotion settings). It can also determine if a VM is stuck and can't vMotion (e.g. using the physical CD-ROM) or if it's oversized or undersized.
• Something Eco4Cloud has and others don't is a technology named Smart Ballooning. With Smart Ballooning Eco4Cloud recovers unused RAM from the VMs and gives it back to the host way before the host goes over the 94% RAM threshold. This allows us to reach higher levels of overbooking.

• It measures the CPU utilization of hosts, the network bandwidth utilization of links, and other aspects of the operation
• It often sends messages—sometimes called watchdog messages—over the network to each host to verify if it is responsive to requests.
• Set Up Notifications And Reports.
• OpManager offers a set of advantages that allow it to adapt to the needs of the company, guaranteeing effective monitoring of the application networks used in our organization.

Incentivized

• It would be useful to have a version that works with OpenStack.
• It should be made compatible with VMware VSAN.
• It would be useful to have a version that works with hybrid clouds using the new "vMotion anywhere" or share nothing vMotion feature.

• Alerts has to be configured correctly otherwise unnecessary bombarding of alerts can cause inconvenience.
• The server on which ManageEngine OpManager is to be deployed should have higher resources as monitoring a large number of devices may slow down the performance of the system.
• Configuring the advanced features may require a learning curve.

This product works very well for our organization, and it would be hard to not have a tool like this going forward

The rating I provided is based on the product quality, experience (I have been using OpManager for almost the last 4 years), and relevance of the information/response I generated through Manage Engine OpManager. I have also received good support from OpManager.

At first, we were not able to add our Avaya switches to the configuration backup module, our partner tried to help, but they did not find the solution, we had one remote session with tech support of ME and they solve the problem.

Incentivized

We compared the consolidation feature and we obtained exactly the same amount of servers in stand-by. The main difference was that Eco4Cloud turned off the unneeded hosts in 2 days while VMTurbo Operations Manager required one day per host. This behavior is caused by the different algorithms implemented by these two products. Compared to Eco4Cloud, VMware DRS/DPM was very aggressive (we tried it in vSphere 5.0). We haven't tested it with vSphere 6 yet.

During our competitive analysis, we found ManageEngine OpManager was not expensive compared to other vendors. At the same time, there was no compromise on the features such as customized reporting or configuring alerts per our clientele's unique requirements. These are our client words "Other vendors ask us to pay more $$$ for enabling additional email alerts".

Incentivized

• Eco4Cloud causes a reduction in power consumption both on old VMware clusters and especially on new ones.
• It also causes a delay in CapEx investments because you buy more hosts only when really needed.

• I don't know if you can calculate ROI with a monitoring solution, there are more factors to calculate.
• We found a really big problem with a network switch (faulty transceiver) in a trunk configuration with OPManager. this caused us serial troubles with the overall network stability.
• We are loosing around € 3.000 to 5.000 per hour if our network is not working so this was a great help to fix this issue
• Our label printers are really important to monitoring in our warehouse system, this makes OPManager a great solution for that