With IT budgets shrinking, enterprises across the globe are faced with a million dollar
question - can I stretch my budget by moving away from capex and embracing opex? Many companies are looking to reduce their data center foot-print (capex) and move their workloads to cloud (opex) where possible. In this endeavour, IT departments are trying to figure out -- should go I with AWS (the market leader in the public cloud), or choose vCloud Air (the public cloud from VMware - the market leader in data center virtualization)?
This post goes over benefits of each, and suggests a different approach to combine the best of both worlds.
| Criteria | AWS | vCloud Air |
|---|---|---|
| Ability to run VMware VMs without migration | Needs AMI migration | No migration needed as vCloud Air runs vSphere |
| Flexibility of VM CPU & Memory combination | AWS provides multiple instance sizes, but doesn’t provide all combinations | Allows one to create any combination of CPU and memory for the VM |
| On-demand addition of vCPU, Memory and Disk | Un-supported | Supported |
| Services | AWS provides extremely rich set of IaaS and PaaS | Extremely light compared to AWS |
| Layer 2 networking | Un-supported | Supported |
| Scalability | Very elastic due to much larger infrastructure | Much lighter compared to AWS |
| Geographical spread | 8 geographical regions (multiple locations in some regions) | 5 geographical regions (multiple locations in some regions) |
| OS support | Wider choice of supported OS | Light compared to AWS |
| High availability | High availability possible through deployment in multiple regions | Hot redundant capacity and instant restart of affected VMs in case of failure |
| Marketplace for virtual appliances | Rich collection of virtual appliances and services | Lighter compared to AWS Marketplace |
| Management Tools | AWS has its own management interface and supports REST APIs for integration | vCloud Air can be managed using VMware tools (e.g. vSphere client, vCAC) in addition to REST APIs for integration |
| Infrastructure maturity | More mature | Less mature compared to AWS |
| Pricing (4 vCPU, 15GB Memory, 80 GB SSD Storage deployed in US) | $0.28/hour | $0.39/hour |
So, which is the preferred option - AWS or vCloud Air? Well, it depends on what matters to you! If Layer 2 networking, integration with existing VMware tools and running VMware VMs without migration is important - vCloud Air is a great option. If you are looking for a mature & scalable cloud with a rich set of services, and a vast geographical reach - clearly AWS is the way to go.
Ravello, a nested virtualization platform enables the ability to run VMware VMs with Layer 2 networking to public clouds such as AWS and Google, bringing together best of both the worlds. Using Ravello one can create an exact replica of VMware based data-center environment on public cloud (see below).
This unique capability enables many use-cases.
Interested? Just sign up for a free Ravello trial, and drop us a line – we can get your VMware & KVM VMs running ‘as-is’ on AWS/Google using Ravello in no time.
The post To vCloud Air or AWS? The million dollar dilemma appeared first on The Ravello Blog.