Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation is a Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solution designed to improve the economics of virtualized data centers with an intelligent software platform, which increases performances and decreases costs.
Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation works on top of a virtualization platform, and uses the exposed API to connect to the platform and optimize the workload placement in a virtual farm in order to make it more…
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Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
Score 9.0 out of 10
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OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of Red Hat OpenShift that offers a unified, scalable platform for migrating traditional VMs. It ensures consistent management across hybrid cloud environments and supports modernization efforts.
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.
I believe that Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is a very promising option for hypervisor at the moment and it seems to be improving quickly. Red Hat is doing a great job working with customers on feature set requests and improving UX and stability
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's a one pane of glass, so when we have Rev only it was a hypervisor for VMs. OpenShift, you can put Ansible in it, you can hook into satellite, it can do with OpenShift AI. You can do AI models and stuff like that. So I think it's more like a Swiss Army knife rather than a fire extinguisher.
OpenShift is really easy of use through its management console. OpenShift gives a very large flexibility through many inbuilt functionalities, all gathered in the same place (it's a very convenient tool to learn DevOps technics hands on) OpenShift is an ideal integrated development / deployment platform for containers
The product is maturing at an amazing rate, but there is still work to do to reach existing VMware customers. Most notably are the HA/DR features, and backup/recovery. We need to have faster backup capabilities, and I know this is in the works with change block tracking - but it is a challenge today. Some users are also scared by the number of volumes created by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, as opposed to the number of VMFS volumes they are used to.
I've not noticed any significant performance impacts with Red Hat OpenShift. I think the development team has put a lot of effort into ensuring that it is performant. And so performance typically is not a major concern for us with Red Hat OpenShift.
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.
Red Hat OpenShift is a more complete and integrated platform, with lots of out of the box components that the other platforms don't have, and customers need to stack lots of other software in order to have monitoring, cost management, log management, user policies governance, and more. Another great benefit Red Hat OpenShift delivers ir the supported operators.
