Hi Scott,
I will make some comments based on my personal experience. We
have implemented both solutions for different customers in Australia, both have
their strengths and weaknesses.
Windows Azure Pack
The good
-
Portal is great, same as Azure
-
Pretty simple to set up, basic implementation requires just
Windows and Virtual Machine Manager.
-
Provides most of the private cloud functions customers are
looking for
-
Great story for Azure public cloud integration, machine
migration is seamless
-
With Hyper-V recovery manager you can use Hyper-V replicas
directly to Azure and to secondary data centre
-
WAP includes Azure Service Bus
-
The Scale Out File Server architecture on the MS platform is
pretty solid, scalability is not bad
-
Licensing is simple, per processor for Windows and all System
Centre products.
The not so good
-
No multi tenancy
-
No ability to customise the portal
-
The chargeback is very basic, you need to implement Service
Manager for detailed reports (and SM is still pretty terrible)
-
Orchestration is fairly basic, you need SCO for custom
orchestration.
-
Needs SCOM for monitoring and alerting, third party ticketing
integration is complex.
-
Not possible with the MS virtual networking stack to do
automated provisioning of multi tier applications, virtual load balancers and
VLAN provisioning.
-
Locked in to MS cloud, poor integration with other cloud
vendors.
-
If customer is existing VMware customer then migration of
virtual machines can require significant effort. P2V migration functionality is
no longer available in VMM 2012 R2, VMware integration is limited.
vRealize Automation (AKA vCAC)
The good
-
True multi tenancy
-
SDN integration is excellent, with NSX vCAC is able to do very
complex provisioning and management of network services
-
Integrates with vCentre Orchestrator, with a couple of hundred
workflows available out of the box
-
Good chargeback functionality out of the box
-
Portal is somewhat customisable.
-
VMware have announced full support for OpenStack, and have an
OpenStack distribution in beta
-
VMware have announced support for Docker, Jenkins and
Kubernetes, so is a good platform for open source cloud application development
The not so good
-
Complex to set up
-
vCloud Air public cloud is still fairly limited availability,
and currently integration is rudimentary.
-
VSAN v1 is fairly basic at the moment, will need to wait for
vSphere v6 for significant improvements
-
Needs vCOps for monitoring and alerting
-
Licensing is complex and pricing of the solution depends on the
size and complexity of the implementation
-
DR options are more complex than MS, SRM is better for
Enterprise DR but is not cloud ready.
Hope this helps.
Dean Gardiner
Practice Lead – Data Centre and Cloud
Australia and New Zealand
Dell | Global Infrastructure Consulting Services
mobile +61 409315591
