While there are clear slices of functionality across OpenStack projects and VMware products that compete in some ways, the general approach and philosophy of the two ecosystems are vastly different. Seeing the differences in philosophy is more relevant than a side-by-side feature comparison. That said, understanding how to compare the technologies to one another helps clarify how they differ. VMware was propelled forward by the adoption of virtualization in the enterprise. As virtualization continued to become increasingly commoditized, VMware gradually pushed up the stack; new value added features were layered around the hypervisor in pursuit of maintaining the market momentum, initiated by the “virtualization disruption.” Ultimately, VMware today is not about cloud, it is about datacenter automation. It is not about infrastructure as a service, it is about virtualization offerings focused at very specific enterprise pain points. Infrastructure clouds in general and OpenStack in particular are not a byproduct of layering functionality around the hypervisor; neither were they originally targeted at the CIO or IT Manager pain points and, therefore, aren’t held back by having to cater to traditional enterprise workloads. OpenStack view of the world involves starting from scratch. It is the philosophy where one says “let us forget about all those existing enterprise applications and automate the infrastructure in a way that carries no legacy dependencies.” IaaS involves a holistic approach to automating the entire infrastructure layer in a uniform way. It is not just about functionality layered around the hypervisor.

1. TM
Mirantis
www.mirantis.com

2. How to think
about a comparison
• VMware solves for the enterprise;
OpenStack solves for the cloud
o Both technology and philosophy differ
o Not an apples-to-apples comparison
• Select features can be compared side by side
o This slide deck provides a reference checklist
• Complete discussion at
http://www.mirantis.com/vmware-openstack

3. VMWare & OpenStack
VMWARE FEATURE COMPARABLE OPENSTACK FEATURE
vMotion KVM Live Migration
DRS Nova Scheduler
DPM TBD
Storage vMotion TBD
SDRS Nova Scheduler
HA TBD
FT TBD
vShield Nova-network service
vDS Quantum/Nova-network service
NetIOC Quantum
SIOC TBD
Storage APIs Nova-volume service
Data Recovery TBD

4. VMotion & KVM Live Migration
• Live migrations of VMs w/0-downtime • Live migration w/up to 2
between different physical hosts w/ seconds service suspend
broad hardware compatibility options. • Migration without shared
• Low-latency link required storage supported w/libvirt
o (max 5 ms RTT). block migration feature
• Metro vMotion allows migration over
metro level networks (up to 10 ms
RTT) by dynamically adjusting TCP
buffer.
• Other limitations include:
o shared storage (VMFS, SAN,
shared NAS) required
o source and target nodes connected
to single L2 segment
o CPUs compatibility required on
source and target.

5. Distributed Resource Scheduler
• Manages workload ‘intelligently’ by • Not supported in OpenStack
grouping virtual machines;ooling resources • Can be implemented using
of physical hosts and prioritizing VMs in external monitoring,
these pools; and moving VMs between FilterScheduler and Live
physical hosts in accordance to vMotion Migration
rules.
• Supports affinity rules governing placement
of virtual machines onto physical hosts.
• Collects usage metrics from physical hosts
and VMs; generates optimization
recommendations executed manually or
automatically – on initial placement or
continuously during runtime.
• Maintenance mode supports moving
workload w/vMotion live migration out of
physical host to perform maintenance (in
auto or manual mode).

6. DRM
• Allows shut down of • Not supported in OpenStack
physical hosts not is use by
VMs. Brings hosts up once
workload increases and
more physical hosts are
required.

7. Storage vMotion
• Allows configuring datastore cluster • Not supported in OpenStack
instead of single store location.
• Can be implemented for
• Provides recommendations for LVM-based persistent
initial virtual disk placement (VMDK) volumes
• Allows moving virtual disks between
nodes in datastore cluster (e.g. for
scheduled maintenance of a node)
• Supports affinity and anti-affinity
rules for VMs/VMDKs
• Only persistent VMDKs, or raw
device mapped (RDM) virtual disks
can be migrated w/ Storage vMotion

8. SDRS
• Allows moving volume storage • Volume type-aware scheduler
workloads over datastore is in nova roadmap (scheduled
cluster w/Storage vMotion. for Folsom)
• Automated recom-mendations • Local storage of VMs resides
for moving VMDKs based on on local disks of compute
space utilization & I/O load of nodes
nodes in datastore cluster. • nova-scheduler supports boot-
• Supports affinity/anti-affinity from-volume feature that
rules. allows to use iSCSI persistent
• Supports manual and auto volume as boot VM device
execution of recommendations.

9. HA
• Automated monitoring of • VM-level HA is on
physical servers availability, OpenStack roadmap for
system health and restart of Folsom release
VMs on another or same
physical server depending
on the nature of the failure.
• Provides suggestions for
optimal placing of restarted
VMs and exposes health
data to the user interface

10. FT
• Allows seamless stateful • Instructions mirroring is not
failover of protected virtual supported by KVM
machines, ensures that • Kemari project (instructions
protected machines are mirroring for QEMU-KVM)
always backed by standby seems to be dormant
copies.
• Hypervisor-level ‘mirroring’
of instructions (vLockstep)
is used to create standby
clones of protected VMs.
• Supported for single VCPU
VMs only.

11. vShield
• Includes components; each is a • Supports per-VM firewall that uses 5-
separate virtual appliance. tuple to policy network access w/
• Zones component provides IP-based Security Groups
applic.-aware stateful firewall that • Network controller performs edge
recognizes IP addresses, ports, firewall, DHCP, DNS, NAT functions
protocol (5-tuple), application type. for VMs
• Edge component provides connection • Cloudpipe allows VPN connection to
on network edge, including 5-tuple VMs (OpenVPN)
firewall, NAT, DHCP server for VMs,
site-to-site IPSec VPN, simple load
• Opensource IDS/IPS can be
integrated into network controller
balancing.
• App component provides firewall on
vitrual NIC level, w/traffic analysis and
reporting.
• Endpoint component provides
integrated anti-virus w/ability to scan
VMs using introspection

12. vDS
• End-to-end • End-to-end physical and virtual
physical and virtual network management in
network Quantum w/following plugins:
management w/ o Cisco Nexus 1000V
Cisco Nexus o Nicira virtual switch
1000V. o Open vSwitch
• Teaming algorithm o Linux bridges
for virtual switch o Ryu network operating
port groups. system (designed for
• Enables Net IO OpenStack specifically; still in
early development stage)
Control
• Nova network offers QoS
API for Xen hypervisor
(XenServer)

13. NetIOC
• Set and enforce network • QoS support on per-tenant
priorities (per VM) across basis for Cisco plugin
the cluster. • QoS framework exists and
• Bridge virtual and physical service can be
network QoS w/802.1q implemented for other
tagging. plugins

14. SIOC
• Supports and manages I/O • iSCSI prioritizing is not
queue to enforce priorities supported in Linux
by dedicating more slots to
VMs w/higher Storage QoS
set

15. Storage APIs
• VASA: allows to integrate • Driver configuration allows
storage solution utilization of back-end
management w/vCenter for storage appliance
management functionality advanced features,
• VAAI: allows hardware- including CoW, thin
supported acceleration provisioning and
features: deduplication, thin deduplication (Nexenta); no
provisioning, cloning blocks API provided by OpenStack
• VAMP: allows I/O path
selection to storage device
(multipath)
• Must be supported by
storage appliance

16. Data Recovery
• Provide ability to backup • Nova-compute provides VM
snapshots of VMs to any snapshot capability
virtual datastore supported • Implementation required for
• Automatically deduplicate scheduled backups,
backup snapshots, automated backup upload
incremently update w/Nova API
previous backups • Existing opensource
backup solutions can be
integrated for deduplication,
incremental backups etc

17. VMware and OpenStack
www.mirantis.com/vmware-openstack