Alternatives? Given these requirements:

[AnDublin]

I'm seeking realistic alternatives to Vsphere 5 . The show-stopper needs for our company are vmotion and storage vmotion of switched-on VMs, so we are on vsphere enterprise licensing and vcenter standard right now.

Is there any alternative product, or combination of alternative products that achieves that?

[weinstein5]

Hyper-V does provide a live migration but it is nothing near the reliability nor stability of VMware vMotion - and with vSphere 5 it has only gotten better - 

[peetz]

According to this fairly recent comparison

  http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/virtualization-shoot-out-citrix-microsoft-red-hat-and-vmwa...

vSphere is the only solution with Storage vMotion capabilities.

Microsoft claims to have a comparable feature (called "Quick Storage Migration"), but it involves suspending and resuming the VM.

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[AnDublin]

Great comparison, thanks!

[J1mbo]

Primary alternative at this point seems to be vSphere 4.1 dare I suggest!  Hopefully, it will be similar to 4 -> 3.5:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101053...

[peetz]

For us Storage VMotion is also a killer feature, and with vSphere 5 VMware even improved it, see http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-0-storage-vmotion-and-the-mirror-driver/.

Good to hear that VMware tries to stay ahead of the competition not only with regards to the price tags, but also the product features ... I'm curious about the first performance comparisons with vSphere 5 ...

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[petedr]

Here is a good comparison matrix site between vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer

http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/matrix.php

It compares:

vSphere 4.1 Update 1

Hyper-V R2 SP1

XenServer 5.6 SP2

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[slaclair]

Pete Del Rey wrote:

Here is a good comparison matrix site between vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer

http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/matrix.php

It compares:

vSphere 4.1 Update 1

Hyper-V R2 SP1

XenServer 5.6 SP2

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wwww.thevirtualheadline.com

Comparing the free version of ESX to the full versions of the competitors?  What am I missing here?

OP, if you post up some numbers we may be able to help demystify this licensing issue that has caused mass hysteria, you may not be as bad off as you thought.  You may have to sit down and look at your performance metrics and see if your configured vRAM is actually at a necessary level so you don't have to obtain additional licenses that may not be needed.

[logiboy123]

Even VMware storage vMotion involves an ultra fast suspend>move>resume event. This is not avoidable in any of the offerings. It's just that VMware's implementation happens so fast you don't notice.

One of the best solutions I can think of for a lot of people is simply running your largest VM's on an unmanaged ESXi 4.1 host with shared storage attached. In the event of a host failure you simply attach the VM's to a different unmanaged host and resume operations. It's not automated, but it's cheap.

Regards,

Paul

[wdroush1]

Paul Kelly wrote:

Even VMware storage vMotion involves an ultra fast suspend>move>resume event. This is not avoidable in any of the offerings. It's just that VMware's implementation happens so fast you don't notice.

One of the best solutions I can think of for a lot of people is simply running your largest VM's on an unmanaged ESXi 4.1 host with shared storage attached. In the event of a host failure you simply attach the VM's to a different unmanaged host and resume operations. It's not automated, but it's cheap.

Regards,

Paul

To be honest with a handful of scripts it can be completely automated.

Though in vSphere 4 the centralized management was worth the cost.

[peetz]

On the site referenced (http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/matrix.php) you can select any other edition of vSphere from the menu on the left. I don't know why the free version of vSphere is the default, that doesn't make any sense indeed.

If you compare appropiate editions the results make sense and provide a really good overview of the features to look at.

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[Marcel1967]

Hyper-V R2/SCVMM2008 R2 offers what is called Quick Storage  Migration. The virtual disk file is moved over the network to another volume. No VAAI or other offload technique in Hyper-V.  Then the VM is suspended and restarted. This will give downtime. As a precaution I shut down the VM during the storage migration as I am not sure if a suspend will do any harm to databases.

For a live storage migration on Hyper-V you need a third party solution. This is Sanbolic Melio FS. This replaces the NTFS filesystem of Microsoft by a Melio developed filesystem. Fully supported by Microsoft. This is a multinode filesystem by design which NTFS is not. Microsoft created a workaround called CSV and used a coordinator mode role for certain metadata changes of VHD files. CSV can only be used to store Hyper-V files on btw. Since version 3.5 of Melio FS  which will be released very soon it offers a RAID1 mirror of a volume. A Melio volume holding the Hyper-V virtual disk files can be mirrored and a switchover to the mirrored volume can be done instantly. So for Hyper-V+Melio FS no live storage migration per VM, you will need to migrate all of the VMs on a Melio FS.

[peetz]

Thanks, this is interesting information.

The lack of a truly clustered filesystem is one of the major drawbacks of Hyper-V (and also Citrix XenServer I think). Good, if this can be solved by a third-party option, but this will surely add up to licensing costs. Do you know how much?

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[Marcel1967]

Melio has 4 editions available. The new 3.5 version to be released anyminute now has also Quality of Service for storage. A process or a VHD file can get a guaranteed storage bandwidth. This will help in times of storage i/o congestion. I believe the cheapest edition is around $1000,- per Hyper-V host.

It will get you a lot more features that just QoS, storage migration per volume  and a clustered filesystem. Volumes which can be expanded live, no more I/O redirection over the network like CSV does. Always wondered why Microsoft did not acquired Sanbolic because CSV is the achilles heel of Hyper-V.  Sanbolic has a booth at VMworld by the way.

[petedr]

You are right, good point.

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[andygroth]

Hi Andreas, you're spot on, I will change the defaults (I initially put "odd" ones together as default to make the user think and then go and change defaults but I see that that isn't intuitive enough - so thanks for the suggestion!

Andy (virtualizationmatrix.com)

PS vSphere 5 will be added when GA (exp August)

[bckirsch]

What you are finding is more people will start to take a look at possible options that they might have never considered before.  Maybe we don't need a "Enterprise" solution for everything like VMware and Hyper-V can do the job of 60% of our virtualization.

[Curdasss]

IMO, KVM is the biggest competitor for VMware and stands to gain the most right now. Hyper-V has too many issue that will not work for an enterprise environment. However, for a true no downtime enterprise envrionment nothing stands up against VMware.