VMware or Microsoft? Automated Server Workload Balancing for Heterogeneous Private Clouds

VMware vSphere 5.x includes automated server workload balancing in the vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise+ premium suites via two feature sets: Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM).  DRS and DPM together are intended to provide an automated method for balancing compute capacity and reducing energy consumption in a highly virtualized datacenter.  It does this by addressing five key technical areas:

    Automated Server Workload Balancing …

• • • • • • Initial Workload Placement
          • Constraint Correction
          • Automated VM Load Balancing
          • Power Management
          • Cluster Maintenance

These capabilities are important to ensure that an organization is efficiently leveraging virtualization host capacity in a manner that provides greatest performance benefits while reducing ongoing operating costs.  However, research has shown that 65% to 70% of organizations are running more than one hypervisor.  As a result, it’s necessary to provide these capabilities universally on every hypervisor platform in use – not on just the most expensive editions of a single hypervisor.

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.

If you want to read the full article, check it out on Keith’s Blog here -

VMware or Microsoft? Automated Server Workload Balancing for Heterogeneous Private Clouds

-Chris