vCloud Director Competition

[abhivirtual]

Hi,

We are pursuing a private cloud initiative and are a big VMware shop looking for conducting some due dilligence and PoC's in the vCloud Director space (vCloud suite). Our Hypervisor platform is majorly VMware, Networking is all going to be Nexus 1000v pretty soon and we also concluded and might be moving ahead with vShield App (VCNS standard) pretty soon.

There are 2 main questions i have for this community -

1. Who are the top 3/4 competitors for vCloud Director in the resource aggregation space?

2. Who are the top 3/4 competitors for vCloud Automation center in the Orchectration space?

Thanks,

AB

[georgeatfox]

We have the same question.  We need to look at the option of federating with a cloud providor and cant seem to find anything like vcloud director. Unfortunately it would cost 700k in licensing us and cant justify it for a small 400 VM environment.  I can use that money and buy our own hardware and install it in a colo.  heck a fully loaded C7000 and a Netapp with 20 TB would cost me less.

We need the ability to easily move VMs in and out of our internal VMware virtual environment to the virtual inforasturture hosting providor as needed.  One of our DCs is old and running out of space and want to see what our options are.  We eventually want to leverage automation via some sort of service request portal as well but thats a year down the line.

We do not want to move away from VMware for our virtual infrastructure.

I would entertain any ideas or suggestions but I would love to see whats out there that offers simmilar functionality to vcloud director at least with the ability to automate and federate.

Come on guys, there's gotta be some VARs and Vendors trolling here

Apoligies AB if I sem to be threadjacking but I think we more or less want the same thing.

[abhivirtual]

Hey George,

Thanks for taking time and replying to this. Yes, it seems we are in the same boat.

Over the past few weeks i did some more research and came to know that MS with System Center 2012 is definitely a competition to vCD but havent found any other prominent ones yet. The automation center though has a lot of competition and almost every big/small vendor is either ready or developing in that space of Orchestration. (Cisco, IBM, Citrix, HCL, BMC, Dell to name a few)

I think the way we would be proceeding is by inviting some of the known names for product demos / PoC's etc and then finding out who provides the best value in terms of functionality, intergration, cost etc. etc. and i think since we already have a lot invested in VMware vCD at the resource aggregation layer might be our answer for that challenge.

I thank you again though for sharing your thoughts.

Regards,

AB

[abergman89]

We scanned almost the entire industry (well, i googled, a lot) after competitors to vCloud, I regularly work with System Center and we looked a alot on the System Center Suite but found that it could cover more OSes to a smaller cost with VMware/vCloud, mostly thanks to the VSPP programme.

There are a lot of good solutions built with System Center, DELL AIM is one of them as I understand it. We settled on vCloud and so far we're not disappointed.

[abhivirtual]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for the info. I think we would also have inclination towards vCD but may evaluate a few options for the Orchestration piece as there is a lot of competition there and some may bring value in terms of price as well. But, thanks for writing back.

Regards,

AB

[qc4vmware]

I have seen no mention from anyone in this thread about VMware's orchestration tool.  Keep in mind that this tool is licensed along with vSphere so there is no additional cost.  All of the other orchestration tools I have evaluated come at a hefty price.  vCO is very powerful and I have as of yet not found anything I could not automate with it.  It comes with plugins for most VMware products and also includes plugins which allow interatction with SOAP and REST api's, Active Directory, SSH, PowerShell etc... There are some attractive 3rd party vendors out there as well which have plugins including Cisco.

Another tool in your arsenal for automation is RabbitMQ.  We have done some very limited testing but you can leverage it along with vCloud directors blocking tasks to do some really cool stuff.  I believe this is also gratis at the moment.

[abhivirtual]

@qc4vmware: Thanks for the post. Yes you are rightm we did mention the Orchestration layer but no mention of the products. I think we are leaning towards comparing some of the vendors. VMware's Automation Center plus vCO & other vendors such as Cisco's CIAC or something, Dell has something of the same affect and others....but yes you are right, cost is a manjor factor and the fact that we are 99% VMware and have laready converted majority of our licensing to vCloud Suite, it might come into play heavinly while making that decision.

Thanks once again!

AB