Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation vs. SolusVM

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.

SolusVM is best-suited to automate VPS services where your users can easily order, customize, manage and upgrade their virtual servers easily. It is less appropriate for managing a single server that does not need to virtualize a cluster of virtual servers.

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.

• Easily manage VPS with OpenVZ, KVM, and Xen virtualization technologies
• Flexible licensing starting from USD 2.5 per month
• Guarantees highly available, reliable, secure and scalable virtual private servers
• Automates your VPS hosting service on a breeze

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.

• Less collection of OS templates
• It is a bit expensive compared to similar software Virtualizer
• Plesk has shifted their main focus from SolusVM to SolusIO

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.

SolusVM is more reliable, robust, stable, and offers more flexible licensing. Very active support team and a futuristic user interface that our clients love.

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.

• SolusVM has helped us to easily automate our VPS management service
• It has decreased our server maintenance cost by many folds
• It has helped us to provide more reliable and scalable VPS services to our customers

Incentivized