VMware vSphere 5.1 looms large

With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware's product line underwent some naming and positioning changes. In the past, there were two different bare-metal hypervisors, one free and one sold as part of the vSphere suite. Now there is just one. The new standard is ESXi 5.1, which still comes in a free version. However, the free version is now limited to 32GB of physical RAM.

The ESXi hypervisor is required for all vSphere installations starting with version 5.0. ESXi does not use Linux, as did ESX, for the service console that executed scripts and provided hooks for third-party agents. The new ESXi code base has shrunk, presenting a smaller attack surface and requiring less maintenance and patching. Higher reliability and stability in the hypervisor translate to fewer headaches for IT administrators and longer uptime for mission-critical applications.

VMware has also introduced three different offerings under the label vCloud Suite, which include bundled products targeted at specific use cases. They are licensed on a per-CPU basis and come in Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions. These products provide the functionality to implement infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds for large data centres or service providers. For this review I focused on the basic VMware vSphere functionality along with the VMware vcentre Server management system.

Installation and configuration: For the purpose of this review I used a Dell PowerEdge R715 server as the primary VMware ESXi host. Dell is a longtime VMware partner, and it has many convenient features, such as the ability to boot the base ESXi image from either an SD card or a USB disk. Dell provides this image on its website, and I used it to create a bootable USB device. Installing and configuring an ESXi host is pretty simple for most any supported hardware.

Configuring a vSphere environment is a different story. If you plan on using any of the more advanced features available from VMware, you will need to install vcentre Server. Here you have several options, such as using an existing Windows Server or deploying the vcentre Server as a virtual appliance (VA). The VA option uses Suse Linux as the base OS and a local database for small installations of less than 50 VMs. For larger installations you must use an external Oracle database. If you go the Windows Server route, you'll also need to have SQL Server installed to house the inventory database.

You must configure a separate network for all vMotion traffic before any virtual machine migrations can be accomplished. Each host participating in vMotion must have a minimum of two Ethernet adapters with at least one supporting Gigabit speeds. Each host must have a port group designated for vMotion traffic with source and destination hosts on the same subnet. That's quite a bit of configuration required to accomplish a migration -- especially when compared to Microsoft's Hyper-V live migration feature, which requires almost no configuration.

New and improved in vSphere 5.1: VMware vSphere 5.1 brings a number of capabilities to the table specifically aimed at the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. These include features like Storage DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), introduced in vSphere 5.0, which automates load balancing across storage devices just as DRS balances VM loads across hosts. With Profile-Driven Storage and tight integration with the new vCloud Director, you get a new level of storage automation not previously available.

With the vSphere 5.1 release also comes a new version of the virtual machine format (version 9) that supports larger virtual machines. Another nice enhancement means the end of reboots when upgrading VM guests to newer versions of the VMware Tools. On the networking front are enhancements to the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) in support of link aggregation (LACP support) and expanded virtual MAC address assignments for large implementations. Other improvements to VDS beef up network monitoring and troubleshooting and even rollback and recovery.

In terms of raw scalability, vSphere 5.1 increases the number of distributed switches per vcentre Server from 32 to 128. It also ups the numbers on static port groups (5,000 to 10,000), distributed ports (30,000 to 60,000), and hosts per VDS (350 to 500).

Managing vSphere 5.1: The traditional management tool, available as a free download, is the VMware vSphere Client. This option is being phased out with the new Web client available with version 5.1 of vcentre Server. In reality, there probably aren't many VMware installations of any size running without vcentre Server. At the lower end, Microsoft makes life easier, as you can manage small Hyper-V deployments with Hyper-V Manager and the new Windows Server Manager tool. (See my review of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.)

That said, VMware's vcentre Server provides the glue that holds large VM deployments together. It's required for many of VMware's advanced features such as the cloning or migrating of VMs. With the new Web client you can easily perform almost any task required to manage your entire vSphere infrastructure. With VMware vSphere PowerCLI, you get the full scripting capability of PowerShell and more than 370 cmdlets to automate almost any repetitive task you need to accomplish in day-to-day operations.

Performance and scale: When you look at vSphere 5.1 from a big-picture perspective, you see a number of enhanced capabilities that directly affect performance. Storage is a key part of the VM puzzle, and the enhancements in vSphere 5.1 for vMotion deliver new capabilities such as using multiple NICs. Using the right type of storage for different workloads can have a significant impact on overall performance as well. vSphere 5.1 supports automated storage management to include different classes of service, allowing you to direct high-IOPS workloads to more expensive SSD storage while allocating lower-cost storage to lower-throughput needs.

Performance and scalability both depend on efficient usage of other resources like network bandwidth and CPU. VMware provides granular control over all of the above, making it easy to implement the likes of Quality of Service (QoS) for the network and limit CPU resources based on service-level agreements. While these considerations are not always part of the performance discussion, they influence how a virtual environment performs overall -- VMware delivers these features in spades.

Final analysis: VMware continues to deliver features and enhancements that make vSphere the obvious choice for any large-scale virtualisation deployment. The new vCloud suites bundle together previously separate pieces required for building a large-scale private, public, or hybrid cloud. While Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 and other solutions may be chipping away at VMware's lead, vSphere still has a number of features -- such as rules-based load balancing for VMs and storage, as well as advanced virtual networking capabilities -- that the competition can't match. These features will certainly make a difference in large settings, and some will make a difference in smaller shops with more complex needs.

Now read:  virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

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Virtualisation showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

Any comparison of Microsoft's Hyper-V versus VMware's vSphere has to take into consideration a number of different factors. First, there's the target customer and the feature set for different sizes of deployments. The needs vary widely depending on the number of virtual machine instances, and these requirements should drive the architecture and configuration choices. Second, there is the topic of management, which is also tied closely to the size of the installation. Beyond these considerations are a number of other issues, including cost, performance, scalability, and usability.

For example, when you install VMware ESXi on a host machine, you have a bare-metal hypervisor that runs independently of any operating system. If you use Windows Server 2012 as the foundation of your virtual infrastructure, you have an operating system that must be patched and updated periodically. That's not to say VMware ESXi doesn't need patches or updates from time to time, but it definitely has a smaller footprint than does Hyper-V.

We'll look at all of these issues and try to compare and contrast the two products from these angles. In the end, the answer depends on all of these factors. The best choice for a small or medium-sized deployment won't necessarily be the same as for a large-scale operation. Other details to consider include corporate culture, existing infrastructure, and history with either of the two products.

Target customer: VMware still has the edge when it comes to the high-end, high-volume virtualisation customer. VMware features such as the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) address the needs of large environments running large numbers of VMs with varied resource requirements. At the other end of the spectrum, you have to give the nod to Microsoft. If a small-to-medium-size business is purchasing Windows Server 2012 anyway, it doesn't make sense to also purchase VMware's vSphere to virtualise a few specific functions.

The hard-to-answer question is at what point it makes sense to go with VMware. Hyper-V 2012 leverages new capabilities in SMB 3.0 that give even the smallest shops the ability to stand up a high-availability cluster using low-cost servers and commodity SAS disk drives. Hyper-V 2012's host-to-host VM replication provides an additional level of redundancy not previously available from Microsoft and levels the playing field from that perspective.

At the same time, VMware has a similar function that uses the same Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) under the covers. These and many other similarities make comparing the two products problematic. In the end they are both compelling products with plenty of capabilities that you can tweak to meet most any virtualisation need.

Management tools: At the low end, Microsoft gives you a basic set of tools in Hyper-V Manager, which comes as an installable option with Windows Server 2012. VMware's traditional management tool, the VMware vSphere Client, is a free client you must install on a Windows PC. Both offerings connect to remote hosts, allowing you to manage any system you can reach over the network.

Some functions are not possible in the basic management tools for either product. Advantage here goes to Microsoft as Hyper-V Manager can, for example, export a VM, then do an import to clone or copy the VM. With VMware you must be connected to vcentre Server in order to export or clone a VM. With respect to monitoring, however, the VMware vSphere Client provides much more information about both the host servers and the client VMs. VMware scores a point here for a more detailed graphical presentation.

VMware provides vcentre Server for managing large installations while Microsoft offers System centre 2012. The latest release of vcentre (5.1) adds a Web client to the mix, providing the ability to manage your VMware infrastructure from literally anywhere. Both VMware and Microsoft support automated management using Windows PowerShell. VMware offers a free add-on called PowerCLI that includes a long list of custom PowerShell cmdlets for managing your vSphere infrastructure.

Performance and scalability: Deciding how to measure performance and scalability presents a challenge when comparing these two products. Microsoft has made a number of enhancements in Hyper-V 2012 that in some cases exceed the outer limits of vSphere. If you want to gauge scalability in terms of raw numbers like nodes supported in a cluster (64 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 32 for vSphere 5.1) or VMs in a cluster (8,000 for Hyper-V 2012 vs. 4,000 for vSphere 5.1), you would deduce that Microsoft takes that round.

But measuring real-world capacity goes way beyond the basic numbers. Case in point: Both products now support the concept of dynamic memory, albeit in different manners. With Hyper-V 2012, you can configure individual VMs with an initial memory allocation and allow the hypervisor to adjust the amount of memory depending on current needs. This is not the default option when creating a new VM but a configuration setting. VMware has had this feature for several years, and the company claims much more real-world experience in the realm of memory utilization. Advantage here goes to VMware, but Microsoft has narrowed that gap substantially with Hyper-V 2012.

At the individual VM level, I used the Sandra 2013 benchmarking tool to determine basic numbers of performance from a single VM running Windows 7 SP1. This VM was configured to have 2GB of memory and two virtual CPUs. I ran four different benchmarks using Hyper-V 2008, Hyper-V 2012, vSphere 5.0, and vSphere 5.1. You can see from the table that Hyper-V 2012 holds its own against vSphere, at least with respect to running Windows VMs. Note that I did not test performance of Linux VMs. (Tests were run on a Dell PowerEdge R715 with dual AMD Opteron 6380 CPUs, 64GB of memory, and two Seagate ST9300605SS 10K 300GB SAS drives configured as a RAID1 array.)  

The bottom line: Finally, one of the most difficult factors to compare is cost. If you're looking at a small number of virtualised servers running Windows Server 2012, you already get that with the purchase of the operating system. Windows Server 2012 Standard comes with two virtual instances, while Windows Server 2012 Datacentre includes an unlimited number of VMs on a single machine. It really doesn't make sense to purchase an additional virtualisation product for a small-to-medium deployment.

VMware pricing starts at £2,354 for VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, plus the vSphere Storage Appliance, covering three hosts with two CPUs each. Pricing for the central management system starts at $1,495 for the VMware vcentre Server Foundation, which supports up to three hosts. VMware vcentre Server Standard, which supports an unlimited number of hosts, costs $4,995. VMware vSphere with Operations Management bundles add deeper monitoring and automation capabilities; they start at $1,745 per processor.

Microsoft charges a base price of $882 for Windows Server 2012 Standard and $4,809 for Windows Server 2012 Datacentre for one machine with up to two CPUs.UK pricing from the web is around £500. This does not include individual client access licenses (CALs), which are required for each user or device accessing the server, or coverage for additional CPUs. The base price for System centre 2012 is $3,607 for a two-CPU server license and unlimited number of managed operating systems.

Microsoft also has a private cloud offering for customers looking to deploy a minimum of 25 server instances. Called the Cloud Infrastructure Server Suite, it includes System centre 2012 and offers advanced features like self-service workflow, automated provisioning, usage metering, and virtual networks.

Nevertheless, VMware has a number of features for high-end users that Microsoft can't match -- notably the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and a more advanced virtual switch. DRS is a self-learning automation engine that balances load across both servers and storage devices. The vSphere Distributed Switch includes enhancements such as network health check, backup and restore, rollback and recovery, and LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) support.

Choosing between the two vendors should be relatively easy for the high-end and low-end customers. VMware still wins the big shops, and Microsoft is now the clear choice for the small guys. The fight over the middle has only just begun, and it promises to be an interesting one. Microsoft will no doubt attempt to creep up the ladder while VMware will do everything in its power to keep the castle walls from being breeched.

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