Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation vs. ManageEngine OpManager vs. VMware vCenter

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

The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.

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

• VSAN storage management and redundancy - high performance IO with built in fault tolerance across the cluster, not reliant on a single hardware item
• VM fault tolerance. The ability to relocate a running VM and restart VMs from failed or isolated nodes
• Resource management and alerting. Tracking load across physical systems and allowing us to rebalance for better utilisation

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.

• Currently, the HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, however, it would be nice if they would port all management functions over to the HTML 5-based Client.
• Performing updates and upgrades to the infrastructure is a bit challenging for someone that may not be as intimate with vSphere. I think the updates/upgrades should be more integrated into the UI and provide the ability to push to the hosts, etc...
• It would also be nice to have a more robust snapshot management tool to prevent snapshot overgrowth. It would be nice to be able to set a lifespan for the snapshot(s)

Incentivized

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

We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using

Incentivized

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.

I work with vCenter for 10+ years and i love it. I can find my way around and can help building and expanding the platform. It is easy to use and there are a lot good communities for the extra support when needed. Even the Homelab community is of great value.

Incentivized

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

VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.

Incentivized

Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.

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

Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality

MS Hyper-V... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment

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

• The positive impact of vcenter is definitely felt in larger organisations in terms of being able to manage multiple servers all in one environment
• It will decrease the amount of time your server engineers will have to spend in the server room or datacenter.

Incentivized