HashiCorp Nomad vs. VMware vSphere

Nomad is well suited for organizations who wish to tackle the problem of cloud computing with as little opinion as possible. Where competing tools like Kubernetes limit the concept of "batteries included," Nomad relies on engineers understanding the missing components and filling them in as necessary. The benefit of Nomad is the ability to build a system out of small pieces with the cost of having more complexity at a system level compared to alternatives.

Incentivized

vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.

Incentivized

• Nomad is incredibly simple by nature, following the Linux philosophy of doing one thing great. That one thing for Nomad is job scheduling.
• Nomad is a modern tool, written in Go with a large community and maintained by HashiCorp.
• Implementation of Nomad is very simple since it is a single binary.

Incentivized

• vMotion that provides seamless movement of Virtual Machines between physical hosts and datastores.
• Ease of Manage: vCenter provides very good management experience to the users.
• It provides hassle free upgrade of versions, which requires good planning.
• Easy to manage datastore, networks, CPU and memory resources.
• It also allows to convert the physical machine and bring it to vSphere Environment with minimum effort.

Incentivized

• Nomad only handles one part of a full platform. Expertise and vision are required in implementing an entire system that is functional enough for an organization to rely on. This includes other tools to handle things like secrets, service discovery, network routing, etc.
• Nomad is delayed in some modern functionality, like features for service-mesh and open tracing. These features are on the tool's roadmap, but there's currently no native support. These paradigms can be established still, but require more expertise outside of Nomad itself.
• Nomad is not the leading tool for this space, and as such risks being left behind by tools with much greater support, such as Kubernetes.

Incentivized

• Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
• More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
• Allow searching tasks or events

Incentivized

We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.

Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.

Incentivized

I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.

Incentivized

Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line

Nomad's primary competitor is Kubernetes, specifically its scheduling component. Kubernetes is a much more complete system that will handle more things than job scheduling, including service discovery, secrets management, and service routing. There also exists a much larger community support for Kubernetes vs Nomad. One might say Kubernetes is the safer choice between the two. Kubernetes is the complete "operating system" for cloud computing, but with it includes complexities that are "Kubernetes" specific. The decision really comes down to a mindset of monolith vs components. With Kubernetes, I would argue you choose the entire system as a whole. With Nomad, you design your system piece by piece. There is no wrong answer.

Incentivized

vSphere has a lot more feature sets than Hyper-V but at a much higher cost of entry versus MS Hyper-V. I have not been able to play with Hyper-V as much as I would have liked, but the setup and ongoing maintenance seems to be easier in vSphere than with Hyper-V

Incentivized

The contract terms are very clear and can be updated as per the project requirement. Customer support is also included in the contract which help us to troubleshoot critical issues very easily. Training included in contract will really help the client team to empower and hands-on on the latest updates and enhancements

As I said earlier, they're always ready to understand our issues and propose the best and most appropriate solution for issues all the time. The security patches solution is accordingly to the business needs. Another scenario is their Knowledge Base where
they're many articles that help you in order to solve something which
is wrong.

Incentivized

• Nomad has allowed our organization to deploy quicker and more frequently with a lower failure rate.
• Nomad has brought in consistency from an operations perspective.
• Nomad's performance allows us to scale infinitely while providing functionality that reduces mean time to repair (canary deploys, versioning, rollbacks, etc).

Incentivized

• Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
• vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.

Incentivized