Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review We used Proxmox to implement private cloud services, for clusters of a small number of servers, from 3 to 11 with and without high availability. Allways with ZFS file systems, and we used to install the root pool in SSDs mirrored and use other pools with RAID 10 in groups of four, for the virtual machines and containers, for the backups and snapshots, we used magnetic disks with RAID 10, in groups of four. Do not use an even number of servers because does not facilitates the implementation of High Availability, because the corosync service must have an odd number of servers to detect a failed server for the quorum system. We used a variety of servers, from clone PCs with AMD Ryzen with 6 cores and 12 threads with 64 GB of RAM no ECC, to high end servers with 64 cores and 128 threads per cpu and 2 cpus per server, with AMD EPYC Rome or Milan, 2 terabytes of RAM ECC.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review BackUp System, provides extensive propiertes and verifications. An exclusive server for BackUp Administration (PBS) Hardware Customization. You can select several properties to adapt the hardware to your needs Easy administration. You will be able to manage the server with easily accessible tools such as the web console and usage statistics. Certificates Administration. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Can't manage ZFS replication or snapshots as easily as I'd like Encrypted disks aren't easily deployed in VMs Moving disks between VMs is not automated Read full review Likelihood to Renew Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.
Read full review Usability Out of every product I have used for this, Proxmox VE is the most concise, clear, and functional I have ever seen. I continue to use Proxmox VE even after occasionally comparing alternatives available because of it's usability, design concept, and great support of features. It's very unlikely I will find a product that can even compete with Proxmox VE in every angle of what Proxmox VE provides.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.
Read full review Performance Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired
Read full review Support Rating They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?
Read full review Implementation Rating It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Proxmox VE is cheaper than VMware, especially upscaling an HA architecture. Compared with other free or less expensive solutions, Proxmox VE is high compatible with more types of hardware solutions and more VM types. From my point of view, Proxmox VE has no competitor at the same price level, it offers the most complete and production-ready HA solution.
Read full review Scalability Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Proxmox has allowed to us to do more with less. We can invest in a single (or multiple if clustering) host with a decent specification, and run most of our infrastructure on it. Open source technologies allowed us to re-use previous skills and knowledge. There was very little onboarding required because we already knew Debian, KVM, ZFS, etc. Virtualisation has vastly reduced the amount of time required to maintain all our systems. Everything is so much more organised and lends itself to automation (with Ansible, in our case). Read full review ScreenShots Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation Screenshots