VMware or Microsoft?–Auto-Balance your Workloads
Automated server workload balancing for heterogeneous private clouds.
“Wow. That’s a mouthful.”
And it’s also a pretty useful set of functionality.
Consider VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM). Those capabilities (available with the vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions) provide the ability to automatically move live workloads (VMs) around and among a cluster of virtualization hosts. Over time and based on various conditions, for the sake of balancing the load (DRS) or conserving power (DPM), virtual machines will be vMotioned (is that a verb?) from host to host.
Now compare and contrast that with similar capabilities provided in Hyper-V and driven via System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. With the support of the built-in Windows Server Failover Clustering (included for nothing extra), Virtual Machine Manager allows you to configure and enable Dynamic Optimization (DO) and Power Optimization (PO).
And finally, add to this the fact that System Center Virtual Machine Manager can provide and drive DO and PO not only for Hyper-V clusters, but for vSphere and XenServer as well.
In today’s article in our “VMware or Microsoft?” series, my friend Keith Mayer breaks down the comparison into these 5 key areas of Automated Server Workload Balancing:
Initial Workload Placement- Constraint Correction
- Automated VM Load Balancing
- Power Management
- Cluster Maintenance
As Keith summarizes:
In this article, we’ll briefly describe each of these key technical areas and contrast with how these same capabilities are delivered in Windows Server 2012 , our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor, and System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) across multiple hypervisors in a heterogeneous Private Cloud . As we discuss each area, you’ll also see that some of these capabilities are integrated into the core of Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012, and as such, those capabilities can be delivered at significantly less cost for organizations seeking to standardize on Hyper-V.