Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

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

Incentivized

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• Easiness of deployment, we can deploy the full stack completely and hardened easier than other container products
• Used to host different workloads (CNF and VNF).
• Easy to scale on both the worker and the infra layer
• Infra nodes do not require subscriptions, which means we are only paying for our workload only, and no hidden costs.

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• Because of how different virtualization is done, there is a learning curve to overcome when switching to it from another hypervisor.
• Documentation needs to be improved. Just finding the details to set it up is a burden that will keep some people using it.

Incentivized

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We have already hab cases in which our customers have a better application performance even in legacy architectures running on Jboss, and even more on cloud native architectures. Customers who hosted their applications on Jboss and wildfly, when running on top of Red Hat OpenShift could benefit from more stability and availability, and in some cases, gains of performance.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

Speedy support

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

The learning curve is quite high but worth it.

Incentivized

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

Some of the various other Kubernetes out there, including Rancher, is probably one of the biggest one. Rancher has a reputation for being very easy to implement. I've found that Red Hat OpenShift is just as easy to implement as Rancher. People just don't really know about it. Nutanix is another hypervisor out there competing with Red Hat OpenShift. Again, I think OpenShift virtualization but maybe isn't as old as Nutanix. I do feel it's more mature.

Incentivized

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to see where we need to be in the container world. I'm going to call it a net neutral impact, not negative or positive. It has given us a sense of what we are ready for and what we're not ready for. You know where you stand.
• You don't know what you don't know, so it helps us know what we want to know.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized