Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization vs. SUSE Harvester

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's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• 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

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

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

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

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.

Incentivized

Speedy support

Incentivized

The learning curve is quite high but worth it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

• The TCO of OpenShift is lower than with VMware
• Implementing VMware has allowed us to drop third party solutions that were effectively required to have a proper vmware deployment
• Licensing over has become less complicated as we also no longer need separate RHEL licesnes

Incentivized

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it