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HashiCorp Consul vs. VMware Cloud Foundation

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Consul

    Score9.6 out of 10
    N/AHashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.

    $0

    always free

    VMware Cloud Foundation

    Score9.5 out of 10
    N/AVMware Cloud Foundation is a hybrid cloud platform for managing VMs and orchestrating containers, built on full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology. With a single architecture that is desribed by the vendor as easy to deploy, VMware Cloud Foundation aims to enable consistent, secure infrastructure and operations across private and public cloud.N/A
    Pricing
    ConsulVMware Cloud Foundation
    Editions & Modules
    Open Source (self-managed)
    $0
    always free
    HCP Consul (Cloud)
    $0.027/hr
    Per Hour
    Enterprise
    Self-Managed Custom Deployments
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    ConsulVMware Cloud Foundation
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    ConsulVMware Cloud Foundation
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    ConsulVMware Cloud Foundation
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.1
    (5 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.8
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    ConsulVMware Cloud Foundation
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:
    • Network mesh
    • Service DNS
    • Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
    • Utility for blue-green deployments
    • Service health checking
    Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    It is best suited for an on-premise cloud solution where customer can shift their entire production environment. Also, the customer has a preference for a Homogenous Infrastructure Environment where budget is not a challenge. It is not at all suited for a Heterogenous Environment, e.g., a Public cloud where integration becomes a huge issue, also in SMB sections where budget is challenging.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • Key-Value database management.
    • Service discovery.
    • Centralized configuration database with native high availability.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • Cloud enabled Solution.
    • Support Container based Apps.
    • Cost efficient.
    • Supports both Public and Private Environments.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    IBM
    • The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
    • It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • The Deployment is complex.
    • Recommended Number of Physical Nodes is three or more; with less than 3 Nodes, it becomes difficult to install V-SAN.
    • Need for better integration. If we go on the public cloud, it is a huge challenge while integrate with an open source platform.
    • Cost can be marginally reduced. SMB segments still prefer a separate license instead of VCF, or they postpone their purchase plans.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    IBM
    Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    IBM
    I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    Although the public Cloud Model follows Opex Costing Model, it actually leads to very high costs also, the infra model in my organization is not suited for a Public Cloud Model. Hence We decided on an On-Premise Model, and the best suited was VMware Cloud Foundation, which is a complete Software-Defined Scale-Out Architecture. I also prefer a Homogenous environment; i.e, support and services from a Single OEM, so that I Can get faster resolutions to my tickets raised.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
    • Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
    • For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • My organization has a size of 1300+ employees, using multiple applications and an exchange mail server that is hosted on On-Premise Cloud, hence scalability has not been a challenge.
    • Having hosted my Production environment and Mail exchange Server on VCF, there has been optimum resource utilization with very little scope downtime. Hence have been able to save a lot of funds on Hardware resources.
    • Due to the size of my organization and due the data load, I have been able to save on Resource Utilization and Organization Funds
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Consul Screenshots

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