Enterprises have a large set of IT assets and it’s becoming difficult for them to discover and utilize all these resources optimally. With Virtualization, enterprises are able to provision the servers much faster but utilization and asset discovery is still an issue. Due to these asset discovery issues enterprises are currently able to use only 70% of their infrastructure.
With a Private cloud infrastructure orchestrated enterprises are able to discover and utilize their assets in a more effective manner. There are a number of private cloud packages both open source and proprietary available such as OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula Ganeti, vCentre Director etc. Each platform implementations vary widely and it becomes very difficult to determine which features are fit for a particular use case.
In this blog I have compared the following three cloud platforms:
OpenStack : Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system.
Eucalyptus: Eucalyptus is an open source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds. It pools together existing virtualized infrastructure to create cloud resources for compute, network, and storage.
vCentre Director: VMware vCloud Director applies the principles of pooling, abstraction and automation to all datacenter services like storage, networking, and security. By dramatically simplifying the provisioning of these services, VMware enables IT to provision complete and operationally ready infrastructure without worrying about the physical configuration of hardware.
We have compared these platforms on the following parameters:
- Hypervisor Support: Manages and orchestrates the hardware resources and provides a virtualization platform to the guest OS.
- Network Support: Network management for shared network resources.
- Storage Support: Support for the virtualization and orchestration of the shared storage such as Storage Area Network, Network Attached Storage, Network File System etc.
- Identity Management: User Management and access control along with Authentication Federation for the Virtualized resources.
- Usage Reporting and Accounting: Support for usage report of the virtualized resources used by different users and accounting on usage of resources.
- Hybrid Cloud: Support for public cloud and private cloud integration.
- Machine Image Support: Support for the Machine Image formats for direct import / export of Virtual Machine Images in the Cloud environment.
- Hardware Requirements: Minimal Hardware requirement for optimal performance to set the Cloud platform software.
- High Availability: Support to create highly available architecture on private cloud by using Auto Scale and multiple availability zones.
- Ease of Expansion: Ease of adding new nodes to the infrastructure on private cloud.
- License : Where the software is available under open source or proprietary license agreement.
- Commercial Support: Is there any commercial support available for the private cloud solution?
- Documentation: Quality and availability of documentation for the private cloud platform.
Now that we have a better understanding of these parameters, let us see how our Private Cloud Providers fare against these parameters:
Which Cloud Provider to Choose ?2) Eucalyptus has API compatible with AWS public cloud which makes it an ideal candidate for Hybrid cloud.
Hope you enjoyed this discussion, to know more on critertias on Cloud migration visit this.