Competitive Analysis of The VMware VRealize Cloud Management Suite

The Virtualization Practice
White Paper:
Competitive Analysis of the VMware
vRealize Cloud Management Platform
Bernd Harzog
Analyst Operations and Cloud Management
The Virtualization Practice
November 2014
2014 The Virtualization Practice. All Rights Reserved.

All other marks are property of their respective owners.
Abstract
Data center virtualization (the virtualization of servers) has provided dramatic benefits to IT
organizations through improved economics driven by server consolidation, and by allowing many
servers of many different types to be abstracted into virtual machines which can then be managed
more efficiently and with greater IT agility.
However, the virtualization of servers and the associated benefits is just the first step on a journey
towards a more fundamentally agile, efficient, dynamic, and responsive IT organization one that is a
true asset to the business, and one that is a source of true business agility and competitive advantage
to the business.
Realizing these benefits means that IT organizations will need to the virtualization of complex multi-
tier business critical applications, the self-service aspects of IT delivery commonly associated with
public clouds, the use of a mixture of private, hybrid and public clouds, and highly automated IT
operations and service delivery into one Cloud and service delivery model with the ability to measure
and track costs across cloud execution options.
Running IT with the agility and cycle times associated with a public cloud while addressing the business
critical enterprise class workloads that IT is counted on to be able to support will require an entirely
new stack of management software than what has prevailed in the legacy physical and static data
center. This paper outlines the criteria for such a new management stack and then compares the
VMware vRealize Suite and several leading alternatives against those criteria.
2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

All other marks are property of their respective owners. ii
Table of Contents
I. Introduction The Software Defined Data Center ................................................... 1
II. Legacy Management Approaches ............................................................................. 2
Heavyweight Legacy Management Frameworks ................................................................ 2
Silos of Non-Integrated Management Tools ....................................................................... 2
ITIL Based Processes and Products................................................................................... 2
Scripts ................................................................................................................................. 3
III. SDDC and Cloud Management Challenges .............................................................. 3
Dynamic Operating Environments ...................................................................................... 3
Scaled Out (not Up) Deployment Models ........................................................................... 3
Distributed (Cloud) Deployment Models ............................................................................. 3
Agile Development .............................................................................................................. 4
DevOps ............................................................................................................................... 4
IV. The VMware vRealize Management Suite ................................................................. 4
V. Point Operations Management Solutions ................................................................. 6
IBM, BMC, CA, HP Legacy Frameworks ............................................................................ 6
CA Unified Infrastructure Management............................................................................... 7
Dell Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition ............................................................... 7
Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) ................................................... 8
SolarWinds .......................................................................................................................... 9
Splunk ............................................................................................................................... 10
VMTurbo............................................................................................................................ 11
Xangati .............................................................................................................................. 12
Zenoss............................................................................................................................... 13
VI. Operations Solutions Comparison Table ............................................................... 15
VII. Point Cloud Management Solutions ........................................................................ 16
A Note on OpenStack ....................................................................................................... 16
BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager ......................................................................................... 17

All other marks are property of their respective owners. iii
Cisco UCS Director and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud ...................................... 18
CSC Agility Platform.......................................................................................................... 18
Dell Cloud Manager .......................................................................................................... 19
Embotics............................................................................................................................ 20
HP Helion .......................................................................................................................... 21
IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack ................................................................................ 23
Red Hat CloudForms ........................................................................................................ 24
RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management .......................................................................... 25
ServiceNow ....................................................................................................................... 26
VIII. Cloud Management Solutions Comparison Table................................................. 27
IX. Comparison of Microsoft and VMware Management Suites............................... 28
Microsoft Strengths ........................................................................................................... 28
VMware Strengths............................................................................................................. 29
Choosing a Cross-Platform Management Suite................................................................ 30
X. Management Suite Comparison Table .................................................................... 32
XI. About VMware............................................................................................................. 33
XII. About The Virtualization Practice ............................................................................ 33

All other marks are property of their respective owners. iv
I. Introduction The Software Defined Data Center
VMware and other providers of data center virtualization software have proven that there are
significant cost savings and improvements to operational agility that come from the virtualization of
the CPU and memory resources (collectively referred to as compute in the diagram below).
The Software Defined Data Center (the SDDC) expands upon the virtualization of compute resources
in several important respects:
The SDDC includes the virtualization of not just compute, but also the virtualization of storage and
networking. Once the ability to virtualize all of the resources in the data center exits, the configuration of
the resources in the data center will be done in the virtualization platform, allowing for a unified
configuration model for the SDDC, and allowing for these unified configurations to follow workloads as
they migrate across servers, clusters, and clouds.
Many data center services that today rely upon dedicated and specialized hardware will be replaced or
significantly augmented by software services that plug into the SDDC. This will allow for the configuration
of these services to be added to the unified configuration model of the SDDC.
Cloud Management software will take advantage of the ability to configure the SDDC in software by
surfacing services and applications in a service catalog and then provisioning those services in an
automated manner while following the policies that apply to those services and the users requesting
those services.
Many organizations have adopted heterogeneous approaches to public clouds and heterogeneous
approaches to the Software Defined Data Center.

All other marks are property of their respective owners. 1
The above factors combine to create a new for a new approach that can effectively manage IT
Operations, Cloud Operations, and costs across these environments.
II. Legacy Management Approaches

Heavyweight Legacy Management Frameworks
Over the course of the last 30 years, major management vendors like IBM, BMC, HP and CA have
built and acquired large suites of management software. The objective of these suites was for one
product to be able to see and manage everything and to give the enterprise a single pane of
glass for the management of their environment.
Unfortunately, the promise of management frameworks was not kept. Acquired products never got
completely integrated resulting in multiple consoles and multiple databases. This lack of integration
prevented these frameworks from accomplishing their most important task allowing IT to operate
with the agility required in the mobile and cloud era. The fact that most management frameworks
are in reality poorly integrated Franken-Monitors simply prevents these products from doing the job
that customers spend a great deal of time and money to achieve. Customers needing tight
integration often had to spend a small fortune on services from the framework vendor to create and
maintain these integrations. This problem is made worse by the fact that in some cases vendors
have built brand new components for cloud management to address market needs, but these new
components are not integrated with the rest of their management frameworks. These frameworks
are now combinations of new and old components that will never operate as a cohesive whole for
their users.
Silos of Non-Integrated Management Tools

Since the enterprise management frameworks were most often collections of poorly integrated
acquired products, the individual products ended up being far from best of breed. While senior
management may have thought that the management problem has been solved when the ELA for
the framework got signed, the people who had to use the tools to do their jobs faced the reality
that many of the point products in the framework were not up to the task. This resulted in most
companies buying additional products that met specific needs, which resulted in many companies
owning over 100 different management tools to manage different silos and layers of their
environment.
ITIL Based Processes and Products

ITIL was an attempt to standardize the processes and procedures by which IT operated. An entire
generation of management products was then delivered which was declared by the vendors to be
ITIL compliant. Included in this attempt at standardization was the requirement to document
processes and apply changes to the environment to a change control process. However the net

effect of the ITIL processes and the tools that implemented them was to impede the agility of the IT
department by attempting to slow down the rate of change. Agile Development and DevOps are
both new processes that were invented in order to allow enterprises to more effectively respond to
the needs of the business through continuous integration and delivery. Management tools that
cannot operate at the speed of Agile Development and DevOps are simply out of date.
Scripts
To the extent to which automation of any kind was implemented it was often implemented via
custom scripts written by one or more IT operations staff. These scripts proved to be impossible to
maintain and proved to be a completely unsuitable foundation for a robust strategy to automate the
operation of the dynamic data center.
III. SDDC and Cloud Management Challenges

Dynamic Operating Environments
Everyone who has implemented server virtualization understands that something as simple as a
vMotion provides for a level of dynamic operation that was simply impossible in the physical world.
The SDDC will take this level of dynamic behavior much further as the configuration of compute,
memory, networking and storage will all be done in the virtualization platform. Centralizing the
control of all of these functions will allow for them to be changed very quickly for example as
workloads are moved around. Responsibility for the execution of some of these functions will now
also be done in software. Some of the network I/O and some of the storage I/O will now occur in
the virtualization platform itself before being handed off to hardware.
Scaled Out (not Up) Deployment Models

The continued improvements in the price/performance of commodity Intel based servers along with
the emergence of lower cost open source alternative application platforms like Linux, JBoss
Application Server, and Apache Tomcat means that it is now much less expensive to have large
numbers of smaller commodity servers than it is to have a small number of high end servers that
maximize CPU count and memory size.
The economics of commodity hardware and open source application platforms have made it
inexpensive to scale server farms out not up. The combination of agile development, modularized
software, and scaled out deployment models means that we now have application systems that run
on hundreds and in some cases thousands of interconnected servers instead of just a few very large
and expensive boxes.
Distributed (Cloud) Deployment Models

Workloads are increasingly being distributed across data centers owned by the enterprise, and
distributed across data centers not owned by the enterprise (hybrid and public clouds). Management

tools need to be able to follow the workloads around as they are moved from one data center or
cloud to another.
Agile Development
The unrelenting pressure to deliver more application functionality in less time has given rise to a
revolution in the process by which software is developed and updated.
Agile Development focuses upon having one small team of developers responsible for each
component of an application system, and then having those developers work as a self-coordinating
team to deliver new functionality into production on regular and short time intervals (every week,
two weeks or at most a month).
The combination of Agile Development, scaled out deployment models, distributed deployment
models and dynamic/shared execution environments (virtualization) creates a set of requirements
that legacy tools cannot meet. These tools simply have too much administrative overhead and are
too costly to keep up with the pace of change in these new agile environments.
DevOps
DevOps has come into being in order to allow rapidly changing applications to be effectively
supported in production. DevOps requires that Operations and Cloud Management tools support the
continuous iteration and tight workflows between applications and operations teams; needs unmet
by legacy management tools.
IV. The VMware vRealize Management Suite

The VMware vRealize Suite is a suite of management solutions which collectively provide for the
Cloud Operations, Cloud Automation, and Business Management services needed to manage a
Software Defined Data Center and any combination of a private, hybrid or pubic cloud components).

VMwares vRealize Management Suite consists of several specific products. Those include vRealize
Operations which provides for the performance, capacity and configuration management of the
SDDC, heterogeneous environments (multi-hypervisor, physical) and hybrid clouds., vRealize Log
Insight which collects and analyzes unstructured performance data (logs), vRealize Automation
which allows for the automated provisioning of infrastructure services and platform services from a
service catalog, and vRealize Business which provides for detailed and transparent costing of all of
the cloud environments and cross-cloud cost comparisons, allowing IT to be run like a business. It is
important to stress that VMware offers the most comprehensive and integrated suite of
management and automation solutions to address the nature of management in the software
defined data center and the cloud

V. Point Operations Management Solutions
Products that compete with the vRealize Operations portion of vRealize Suite broadly fall into two
categories. There are legacy solutions that were built for the physical and static data center that
preceded the current modern virtualized and dynamic environment. Vendors of these legacy
solutions have been trying to modernize them to address data center virtualization. But these
solutions were designed around a set of assumptions that no longer hold true in the modern data
center. Specifically these legacy solutions assumed workloads dedicated to servers, and a very low
rate of change. These assumptions drove the design of these legacy solutions, and have made it
impossible for these legacy vendors to fully modernize these solutions for the modern dynamic and
shared data center.
The second set of competitors are products that consume the standard vSphere API data, and just
the standard vSphere API data. These products store that data in a database, provide a dashboard
for that data, provide alerts on that data and provide reports on that data. The problem with these
products is twofold. The first is that by being reliant on the same data that everyone else is reliant
upon, these products struggle to provide unique and differentiated value to the customer. The
second is that they all rely upon manual thresholding instead of automated analytics to understand
the difference between normal and abnormal behavior. Manual thresholding simply imposes an
unreasonable maintenance burden upon the users of an operations management tool as in a
dynamic environment the rate of change is too high and there are too many metrics of interest for
humans to be able to correctly set and maintain thresholds. Most of these products also fail to
combine unstructured log data with the standard structured performance data from the vSphere
API.
IBM, BMC, CA, HP Legacy Frameworks

Many enterprises have substantial investments in legacy management frameworks from IBM, BMC,
CA and HP. These frameworks typically manage the entire physical hardware infrastructure of the
data center including the storage arrays, the SAN, the internal IP network, the servers, and the WAN
between data centers and the WAN between the data centers and the users or branch offices.
These legacy frameworks consist of the following operations management components:
IBM - the Tivoli product line
BMC - the legacy Patrol product line, and the current replacement for that product line BMC
ProactiveNet Performance Management including the entire BMC Cloud Operations Management suite
CA the legacy UniCenter product line, the legacy Spectrum product line which was originally the eHealth
product line from Concord communications, and the currently marketed set of products which include
Capacity Manager, Virtual Placement Manager, and Visual Infrastructure.

HP the legacy OpenView product line, and its current replacement, HP Operations Manager and the
companion agentless solution - SiteScope
What all of these products have in common is broad and deep support for the legacy physical data
center including all of its various hardware and software infrastructure components. What they also
all lack is a modern design focused upon the operations management of a modern environment that
consists of data center virtualization, private clouds, hybrid clouds, public clouds, and the
forthcoming software defined data center. Therefore for customers with a deep investment in these
technologies, replacing them with vRealize Operations is not feasible however neither is it feasible
to expect these legacy management solutions to be able to manage the new dynamic and
distributed software defined data center. Customers with substantial investments in legacy
frameworks from IBM, BMC, HP and CA should therefore augment those investments with
deployment of vRealize Suite in order to be able to manage new, dynamic, and distributed
environments.
CA Unified Infrastructure Management

CA Unified Infrastructure Management (formerly Nimsoft) is a low end and simple agentless
commodity network and server monitoring solution. Nimsoft was originally designed for service
providers, and was successful in this market because it provided a simple and affordable monitoring
solution with multi-tenancy to this audience. CA acquired Nimsoft in March of 2010. Since the
acquisition, CA has replaced most of the Nimsoft management team with CA veterans, who have
made Nimsoft more expensive and more difficult to deploy.
CA Unified Infrastructure Management is now distinguished as being a low end agentless monitoring
solution with no analytics, no deep integration with virtualization platforms, no integration with
cloud platforms and no companion log management solution sold at typically higher than acceptable
CA pricing.
Since CA Unified Infrastructure Management has not been modernized to be able to keep up with
the Software Defined Data Center and the Cloud, customers would be well served not to consider it
for these use cases and should instead focus on solutions like vRealize Operations which have
modern up to date capabilities.
Dell Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition

Dell Foglight for Virtualization, part of the Dell Foglight product line (acquired as a part of the
Quest Software acquisition), includes components for managing hardware, servers, networks,
storage, and applications. The major benefit of Foglight for Virtualization is that other Foglight
components that monitor deeper into the stack (like those that monitor physical servers, networks
and storage) and those that monitor higher up in the stack (like those that monitor application
performance) can be plugged into Foglight for Virtualization creating an end-to-end management
solution.

The issue with Foglight for Virtualization is that Dell does not have an integrated cloud management
suite of which Foglight is a part. Dell has no counterpart to either vRealize Business, or vRealize Log
Insight.
Therefore, enterprises with a substantial investment in the vSphere platform, would be better
served implementing an integrated management suite that covers Operations Management, Log
Management, Cloud Management and Business Management. vRealize Suite covers these fronts and
has the additional advantage of being deeply integrated into the vSphere platform, with excellent
coverage of both on premise assets and assets running in public clouds.
Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Microsoft Systems Center is the leading operations, performance, capacity, configuration (through
System Center Configuration Manager) management solution for the Microsoft Windows platform,
and the Microsoft provided infrastructure applications (SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint, and Exchange
Server) that run on the Microsoft platform and its associated virtualization layer Microsoft Hyper-V
(through System Center Virtual Machine Manager).
Therefore, enterprises with a substantial investment in the Windows platform, and Microsoft server
based applications running on that platform are making a rational choice when they choose to use
Microsoft Systems Center to manage their Windows assets as Systems Center contains deep
management capabilities for the Windows environment not offered by other management software
vendors.
However, when it comes to managing a modern virtualized data center with a private or hybrid
cloud built on top of it, and the forthcoming private/hybrid/public cloud environments, especially
one based upon the VMware vSphere platform, Microsoft System Center has the following significant
gaps:
System Center is missing the cross-hypervisor and cross cloud operations management capabilities present
in vRealize Operations.
System Center is missing the cross-hypervisor and cross cloud automation capabilities present in vRealize
Automation
System Center is missing the cross-hypervisor and cross cloud business management capabilities present in
vRealize Business
System Center is missing the ability to collect and analyze log data present in vRealize Log Insight.
Systems Center is missing the ability to apply sophisticated self-learning analytics to IT Operations metrics
and log data which are core capabilities of vRealize Operations.
Therefore enterprises with a substantial investment in the Windows platform may well choose to
manage physical Windows servers, virtualized Windows OS instances, and the Windows applications
that run on these instances with SCOM. However for a customer with a joint and heavy investment

in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows, VMware vRealize Operations is a better choice to
manage the operations, performance, capacity, configuration and chargeback for the virtualization
platform and the clouds that run on this platform. VMware vRealize Operations has the following
advantages of Microsoft SCOM in this respect:
vRealize Operations provides an integrated operations, performance, capacity, and configuration solution
that supports vSphere and all of the guest operating systems that run on vSphere, as well as the Microsoft
Hyper-V platform through the use of the Hyperic agents for Windows.
vRealize Operations is based upon self-learning performance and capacity analytics that automatically and
continuously learn the normal state and behavior of the environment. This leads to a dramatically lower
cost of ownership and dramatically lower admin requirements as the product reacts automatically to the
changes that occur in a dynamic, shared and cloud based environment.
VRealize Suite includes vRealize Log Insight. This allows for Operations Management decisions to be based
upon a combination of vSphere Operations metrics and log data, a capability completely missing from
System Center.
VRealize Suite includes vRealize Business which tracks the true costs of operating clouds across various
options for implementing clouds, include in house private clouds, hybrid clouds and public clouds like
Amazon and Azure.
For customers with a substantial investment in Windows and SCOM, vRealize Operations is integrated with
SCOM via its SCOM connector. This allows data from SCOM to be fed into vRealize Operations, combining
detailed Windows metrics with the vSphere metrics that vRealize Operations collects for automated
modeling and thresholding via vRealize Operations self-learning analytics.
In summary, enterprises with a substantial investment in both VMware vSphere and Microsoft
Windows may well choose to manage their Windows assets with Microsoft SCOM. But the operations
management of the data center virtualization, private cloud, and hybrid cloud environment, even if
it spans VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, is better accomplished with VMware vRealize
Operations for the reasons cited above.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is an Operations Management solution for VMware vSphere and
other virtualization platforms. Virtualization Manager offers basic dashboards, capacity
management, performance management, sprawl detection, and configuration drift detection. The
focus of the solution is smaller environments which are complemented by a download driven
evaluation and sales model.
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is not an enterprise grade Operations Management solution. The
lack of self-learning analytics makes it unable to deal with large scale, complex, and dynamic
environments like private clouds, hybrid clouds and the forthcoming software defined data center.

SMB and SME customers who do not have the need for enterprise grade operations management
solutions and who have smaller environments should consider SolarWinds Virtualization Manager as a
point solution. But those doing so should be aware that just because you do not have a large
environment does not mean that you will not want to have a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or take
advantage of the software defined data center in the future. Forward looking customers with these
types of environments might then be better served by starting out with vSphere with Operations
Management which is a cost-effective bundle of the VMware vSphere virtualization platform and
vRealize Operations Management.
Splunk
Splunk has the long term potential to be the most formidable competitor of VMware vRealize
Operations in the Operations Management space of any vendor covered in this document. This is
because today Splunk has a big data back end into which it stores log data that it collects from a
variety of sources, as well as Operations Management data via its Splunk App for VMware.
However, the key to understanding Splunk does not lie with the capabilities of its own product.
Rather it lies in understanding its ecosystem strategy. Splunk has partnered with a wide variety of
vendors like Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, F5, AppDynamics, AppEnsure, Boundary, Compuware,
ExtraHop, Prelert and Netuitive all of whom add value to the Splunk Enterprise Platform. Therefore,
competing with Splunk is not just a matter of competing with Splunk, but rather with Splunk and its
entire ecosystem.
However, Splunk has two significant weaknesses. The first is that Splunk is priced on the basis of the
amount of data that is ingested per day. This creates a situation where no vendor is currently
putting all of their data into Splunk since if they were to do so, it would force the customer to buy
an extremely expensive Splunk license. This exposes a significant weakness in the Splunk ecosystem
argument as the integrations between the third party vendors and Splunk tend to be ad-hoc and
weak as opposed to the promise of all of your data in one place.
The second weakness is that Splunk is, by its very nature, an after the fact troubleshooting tool.
The customer has to wait for a problem to occur. Then they have to know enough about the
problem to be able to write a Splunk query to find all of the things that relate to that problem. Only
after all of this happens can Splunk provide the customer a meaningful answer. Now it is possible
for Splunk to automatically send alerts based upon periodic queries and manual thresholds, but this
relies upon someone knowing enough to write the query and knowing enough to set and maintain
the threshold. Splunk has no counter-part to the self-learning analytics in vRealize Operations, nor
does Splunk have any way to automatically set thresholds based upon learned behavior. The only
way to get this level of functionality with Splunk is to buy a third party add-on analytics package
from either Prelert or Netuitive.

VMTurbo
VMTurbo is an Operations Management solution for VMware vSphere and other virtualization
platforms that contains a unique economic scheduling engine. This economic scheduling engine
allows customers to assign budget in terms of priority to their workloads. The scheduling engine
then assures that the workloads with the highest budget (the most important ones) get the
resources that they need. Other than this one unique feature, VMTurbo is a standard virtualization
focused Operations Management solution with the expected set of performance management and
capacity management features.
However, despite the one unique feature in VMTurbo, VMTurbo is lacking the comprehensive set of
features that are required for operations management of a modern virtualized data center, private
cloud, hybrid cloud or the forthcoming software defined data center. VRealize Suite delivers these
missing capabilities which include:
Self-learning analytics for all of the operational metrics in the virtualized environment, not just those
pertinent to a workload migration decision.
Through vRealize Configuration Manager (included in the Enterprise Editions of vRealize Suite), vRealize
Operations includes the ability to manage and ensure the configuration of the virtual environment and its
guest operating system. vRealize Advanced includes the ability to manage the configuration of the virtual
and physical infrastructure. vRealize Enterprise includes the ablity to manage the configuration of the
guest operating systems in the virtual machines. These capabilities are missing in VMTurbo.
Through vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Suite), vRealize Operations includes the ability to automatically discover the topology of the environment
from the perspective of the workloads running in the guest operating systems. This holistic view of
application systems is completely missing from VMTurbo.
Through vRealize Business (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Operations),vRealize Operations includes the ability to charge constituents of data center services based
upon the resources consumed by their workloads in the virtualized data center. This is a critical capability
especially for business constituents that are self-provisioning workloads out of a service catalog presented
by a cloud automation solution like vRealize Automation. The ability to chargeback business constituents is
completely missing from VMTurbo.
With the addition of vRealize Log Insight, and the bidirectional integration between vRealize Log Insight
and vRealize Operations, vRealize Operations now benefits from the information in unstructured log data.
VMTurbo is completely blind to this source of data.
In summary, enterprises with a small number of very high priority workloads and a larger number of
low priority workloads may well choose to use VMTurbo to ensure that the most important
workloads get the resources that they need. However, even if VMTurbo is chosen in this role it is not
a substitute for a complete operations management solution like vRealize Operations.

Xangati
Xangati is a performance management solution for vSphere environments that focuses upon
collecting the normal metrics from vSphere and complementing those metrics with detailed metrics
from a variety of network sources like netflow, SNMP, DNS AAA/Radius, and LDAP. These metrics are
then processed in a performance management engine and displayed on a real-time streaming
dashboard.
Xangatis solution is most appropriate when real time network performance can be a constraint to
virtualized servers and desktops. For example in a VDI scenario, the exact nature of the VDI
workload and the exact configuration and capacity of the network between the end user and the
virtualized desktop can have a huge impact upon the response time of the VDI environment and
therefore the end user experience.
Despite Xangatis real time focus upon network performance as a component of the overall
operation of a virtualized environment, it is not a generalized operations management solution, and
therefore not a substitute for VMware vRealize Operations, including vRealize Operations for View.
Xangati is lacking the comprehensive set of features that are required for operations management
of a modern virtualized data center, private cloud, hybrid cloud or the forthcoming software
defined data center. VMware vRealize Operations delivers these missing capabilities which include:
Self-learning analytics for all of the operational metrics in the virtualized environment, not just those
pertinent to a workload migration decision.
guest operating systems in the virtual machines. These capabilities are missing in Xangati.
Through vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Suite), vRealize Operations includes the ability to automatically discover the topology of the environment
from the perspective of the workloads running in the guest operating systems. This holistic view of
application systems is completely missing from Xangati.
Through vRealize Business (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Operations),vRealize Operations includes the ability to charge constituents of data center services based
upon the resources consumed by their workloads in the virtualized data center. This is a critical capability
especially for business constituents that are self-provisioning workloads out of a service catalog presented
by a cloud automation solution like vRealize Automation. The ability to chargeback business constituents is
completely missing from Xangati.
With the addition of vRealize Log Insight, and the bidirectional integration between vRealize Log Insight
and vRealize Operations, vRealize Operations now benefits from the information in unstructured log data.
Xangati is completely blind to this source of data.

In summary, enterprises sensitive about network performance may well choose to use Xangati to
ensure that the users of these applications get an acceptable end user experience. However, even if
Xangati is chosen in this role it is not a substitute for a complete operations management solution
like VMware vRealize Operations.
Zenoss
Zenoss Service Dynamics is a family of products designed to deliver end-to-end assurance of
environment availability and performance across physical, virtual and cloud based environments.
Zenoss collects data from a wide variety of data sources including physical servers, networks,
storage devices, as well as converged infrastructures and virtualization layers. Zenoss then
constructs a model of the environment which understands how elements of the environment are
related and are dependent upon each other.
This model based approach to understanding the physical and virtual topology of the entire
environment makes Zenoss well suited to understanding where and how failures in elements that
comprise the system are impacting key business services. Therefore Zenoss can be viewed as an
effective and modern replacement for the legacy event management and correlation frameworks
from IBM, BMC, HP and CA.
However, for customers with a heavy investment in VMware vSphere and who are building private
and or hybrid clouds on the vSphere virtualization platform, Zenoss is not a substitute for VMware
vRealize Operations as a complete enterprise grade operations management solution. As an
enterprise grade operations management solution, Zenoss is missing the following key functionality
with respect to VMware vRealize Operations:
Self-learning analytics for all of the operational metrics in the virtualized environment. Zenoss manages
events and a performance event in Zenoss is based upon the violation of a manually set resource utilization
threshold.
guest operating systems in the virtual machines. These capabilities are missing in Xangati.
Through vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Operations), vC Ops includes the ability to automatically discover the topology of the environment from
the perspective of the workloads running in the guest operating systems. Service Level views exist in
Zenoss, but they must be manually defined on a per service basis.
Through vCenter Chargeback Manager (included in the Advanced and Enterprise Editions of vRealize
Operations),vC Ops includes the ability to charge constituents of data center services based upon the
resources consumed by their workloads in the virtualized data center. This is a critical capability especially
which business constituents are self-provisioning workloads out of a service catalog presented by a cloud

automation solution like vRealize Automation. The ability to chargeback business constituents is
completely missing from Zenoss.
In summary, Zenoss is an appropriate replacement for legacy event management frameworks from
IBM, BMC, HP and CA. However, Zenoss is not a substitute for an enterprise grade Operations
Management solution that addresses performance, capacity, configuration, and chargeback
management for virtualized and cloud based environments in particular those headed towards the
software defined data center and combinations of private, hybrid and public clouds.

VI. Operations Solutions Comparison Table
The table below provides a summary comparison of the operations management functionality of the
vendors and products detailed in the previous section. As the table shows, VMware vRealize
Operations is the most functionally rich operations management solution in the virtualization
market.
0 The product does not implement the capability
2 The product partially implements the capability
4 The product fully implements the capability

VII. Point Cloud Management Solutions
A Note on OpenStack
HP, IBM, and Red Hats cloud offerings are based upon OpenStack. This is reflected in the image
below which shows which vendors have provided the most contributions to the latest release of
OpenStack (IceHouse). The important point to make here is that the inventor of OpenStack,
Rackspace, is now only the number 4 contributor suggesting that Rackspace is backing away from
OpenStack. Furthermore IBM, HP and Red Hat all have very different commercial interests regarding
OpenStack. Red Hat wants its OpenStack distribution to be the extension of its middleware offerings
for cloud management. IBM and HP each want their OpenStack distributions to give them viable
offerings in competition with Amazon Web Services in the public cloud and VMware in the private
and hybrid cloud markets. Given these highly divergent commercial interests it is likely that IBM, HP
and Red Hat are going to have a very difficult time agreeing on the path forward for OpenStack, and
that OpenStack will fracture into multiple different offerings that have a common open source core
to them.
For example, both IBM and HP need public and on premise cloud offerings. For their public cloud
offerings they need to be price competitive with AWS. That means that they cannot afford to pay
license or support fees to anyone, including Red Hat. Which means that it is highly likely that IBM
and HP will not be running the Red Hat supported distribution of OpenStack in their public clouds.
Contributions to OpenStack (IceHouse) By Vendor
The problem of having different vendors agree on the technical direction for OpenStack and the
implementation of OpenStack is exacerbated by the complexity of OpenStack. The diagram below
shows the major components of OpenStack and how they relate to each other. The complexity of
OpenStack, the divergence of interests on the part of its members, and the fact that all of the

vendors who rely upon OpenStack will have to compete with VMware, Microsoft and Amazon, raise
questions about the long term viability of OpenStack (see Is OpenStack Dead).
BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager

BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager is a fully featured on-premise cloud management offering. It has
support for all of the popular hypervisors and public clouds. With respect to vRealize Suite, BMC
Cloud LifeCycle Manager is missing the following key capabilities:
Granular control of policies and capabilities by user and by group. With vRealize Automation, various levels
of authority and capability can be easily delegated to various groups and constituents. This turns
provisioning of cloud services into a cooperative workflow between IT and its business constituents.
Anything as a Service and in particular, Applications as a Service. Business constituents have little use
for a rapidly provisioned operating system. What business constituents want and need are rapid delivery of
application services, and rapid on-boarding of users and contractors. The ability to rapidly deliver these
high level services is a key differentiating feature of vRealize Automation and is missing from BMC Cloud
LifeCycle Manager.
The ability to accurately measure the true cost of each cloud service across cloud service options (an
internal implementation of vSphere, an implementation of vCloud Air, or an implementation of a service
on Amazon or Microsoft Azure, is a key differentiating feature of vRealize Business, a component of
vRealize Suite. This ability to manage IT as a business is completely missing from BMC Cloud LifeCycle
Manager.
Integrated Log Management. VRealize Suite includes vRealize Log Insight, a robust and easy to use log
analysis solution. Log Insight is also integrated with vRealize Operations allowing for insights from both log

data and metric data to be shared across the two products. BMC has no comparable log management
solution.
Cisco UCS Director and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

The focus of Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) is the provisioning of physical converged infrastructures like
the Cisco UCS, VCE vBLOCK and NetApp Flexpods, as well as then providing the ability to build
Infrastructure as a Service clouds on top of these infrastructures.
For a converged infrastructure like a UCS, a vBLOCK or a FlexPod there are substantial benefits to
combining the provisioning of the physical infrastructure with the cloud services that use the
infrastructure. This is true in the case of these converged infrastructures since they are more
configurable via software than traditional combinations of servers, networks and storage.
However, Cisco UCS Director is not an effective or complete substitute for the combination of
VMware vRealize Automation. With respect to the VMware offerings Cisco UCS Director is missing
the following capabilities:
Support for diverse hardware. While Cisco UCS director can provision and configure the hardware layer in
converged infrastructures that include a Cisco UCS, it cannot provide this capability for the general
hardware in place in virtualized data centers.
Therefore as soon as the hardware is not a UCS, UCS Director is simply a cloud management solution that
can provide Infrastructure as a Service in a service catalog with automated provisioning of those services.
vRealize Automation provides a much richer set of functionality when it comes to implementing private
and hybrid clouds than does USC Director. For example, vRealize Automation has a sophisticated role
based access capability that enables the ability to define services to be distributed to various business
constituencies with the appropriate controls for each constituent. vRealize Automation includes the ability
to define groups of VMs as one service, allowing either the entire software infrastructure for an
application or an entire N-tier application system to be defined as one integrated service.
Encapsulation of applications. vRealize Automation takes private and hybrid clouds to a new level,
allowing for the provisioning of the actual applications which run on the platforms in the virtual machines
to be automated and encapsulated.
In summary Cisco UCS Director is an acceptable solution to build infrastructure as a service clouds on top of
converged infrastructures that include a Cisco UCS. It is not a general purpose enterprise cloud management
platform that supports the breadth of environments supported by vRealize Automation, and it does not extend
the ability to deliver application level services into clouds as does vRealize Code Stream.
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC) is Ciscos full cloud automation solution. It is capable of
delivering a wide variety of services through a service catalog, but is missing the ability to encapsulate entire
application systems and deliver complete applications as a service as vRealize Automation can do.
CSC Agility Platform

CSC has acquired ServiceMesh, and the ServiceMesh Agility Platform is now the CSC Agility Platform.
It is an enterprise grade cloud platform suitable for building infrastructure as a service, platform as

a service and application level services across a wide variety of environments. CSC offers enterprise
grade policy enforcement, security, role based access, and most importantly the ability to manage
the life cycle of actual applications in private and hybrid clouds.
While the CSC Agility Platform is an enterprise grade cloud management platform, customers with
substantial investments in the VMware vSphere platform should evaluate CSC not just against
vRealize Automation, but against the entire vRealize Suite. Customers should take this approach
because the combination of VMware private and hybrid clouds and various public clouds requires the
following approach:
Integration of Software Defined Networking, specifically VMware NSX with vRealize Automation, vRealize
Operations, and vRealize Log Insight. The ability to define a network in software is useful only to the
extent to which this capability is then automated in a cloud management solution that brings the benefit
of rapid network configuration to the customer in a service catalog. vRealize Automation integrates with
NSX allowing for the automated configuration and deployment of NSX software network segments as a part
of the deployment of a N-Tier application system. Similarly NSX will create new opportunities for real time
understanding of end-to-end network latency and the impact of network latency upon application
performance. The combination of vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insights creates an operations
management platform that is able to ingest real time performance information in the form of log events
(through vRealize Log Insight), and then apply self-learning analytics to these events (through vRealize
Operations).
Integration of Software Defined Storage via vSAN, with vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, and
vRealize Log Insight. The ability to define storage in software is useful only to the extent to which this
capability in then automated in a cloud management solution that brings the benefit of rapid storage
configuration to the customer in a service catalog which is present in vRealize Automation. Similarly
storage virtualization will create new opportunities for real time understanding of end-to-end storage
latency and the impact of storage latency upon application performance. The combination of vRealize
Operations and vRealize Log Insight creates an operations management platform that is able to ingest real
time performance information in the form of log events (through vRealize Log Insight), and then apply self-
learning analytics to these events (through vRealize Operations).
Customers should also be aware that the CSC Agility Platform is a complex solution to implement
requiring a great deal of vendor provided services.
Finally, enterprise customers who are going to follow VMwares product evolution towards the
Software Defined Data Center should choose a suite of management solutions that can manage the
SDDC, and keep up with VMwares evolution of that SDDC. Deploying such a SDDC management suite
will be essential order for enterprises to realize the full benefits of the SDDC.
Dell Cloud Manager

Dell Cloud Manager is notable for its ability to deploy applications across private and hybrid clouds
like those based upon VMware vSphere, and also public clouds like Amazon AWS, BlueLock,
CloudStack, Eucaplytus, GoGrid, the HP Cloud, the IBM SmartCloud, Joyent, OpenStack, Rackspace,

Terremark and Windows Azure. However, Dell Cloud Manager is missing the following key
capabilities present in vRealize Suite:
high level services is a key differentiating feature of vRealize Automation.
on Amazon or Microsoft Azure) is a key differentiating feature of vRealize Business, a component of
vRealize Suite.
Integrated Operations Management. VRealize Suite includes vRealize Operations which provides for robust
performance and capacity management based upon sophisticated self-learning analytics. This allows
vRealize Operations to manage the performance and capacity of services deployed by vRealize Automation
in a seamless manner.
data and metric data to be shared across the two products. Dell has no comparable log management
solution.
Embotics
Embotics vCommander 5.1 is designed to be an easy to deploy infrastructure as a service offering
that includes integrated basic monitoring and integrated basic chargeback. The target audience for
vCommander is organizations that just need to stand up a simple IaaS cloud. This most often
includes simple test and development scenarios and well as cloud deployments in small to mid-size
businesses. Due to its focus upon simplicity, ease of installation, and smaller customers,
vCommander is missing key enterprise scale cloud management features like:
high level services is a key differentiating feature of vRealize Automation.

vRealize Suite.
data and metric data to be shared across the two products. Dell has no comparable log management
solution.
HP Helion
Helion is HPs distribution of OpenStack which is based upon the IceHouse release of OpenStack with
HPs value added components including HP Cloud Services Automation. The core OpenStack
components of Helion are shown in blue below. And the HP additions are shown in green. This points
out a core weakness of OpenStack. The open source distribution of OpenStack alone is not an
enterprise grade cloud management platform which is why an adopting vendor like HP has to add
so many unique components to it. But once these unique components are added, OpenStack ceases
to become any kind of a compatible and open platform across vendors, which was its supposed
original intent.

In addition to being an inelegant combination of an open source project and vendor proprietary
additions, HP Helion is missing the following key functionality when compared with vRealize Suite:
application services, and rapid on-boarding of users and contractors. Helion does include a distribution of
CloudFoudry, but it is not the officially supported version of CloudFoundry from Pivotal.
vRealize Suite.
data and metric data to be shared across the two products.

IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack
IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack is the IBM Cloud Manager (with IBM Smart Cloud Orchestrator)
product layered on top of OpenStack. Therefore like HP Helion, it is a hybrid of an open source
offering and numerous vendor proprietary extensions. The basic management of resources is done
via the OpenStack components and all of the features that target the enterprise use case come from
IBM proprietary extensions. The IBM extensions are on the left of the diagram below under the
Cloud Manager API.
As is the case with HP Helion, there is nothing open or standard about IBM Cloud Manager with
OpenStack. The extensions from IBM are incompatible with the extensions from HP creating two
different and proprietary solutions.
Even with the extensions from IBM, Cloud Manager is missing the following enterprise grade
capabilities present in vRealize Suite:
application services, and rapid on boarding of users and contractors.

vRealize Suite.
Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat has integrated the old CloudForms with the acquired ManageIQ EVM into the new Red Hat
CloudForms product. CloudForms is therefore Red Hats strategic cloud management offering for its
own KVM and OpenStack based clouds. Therefore this new product will be the cloud management
and operations management solutions for Red Hats infrastructure as a service and platform as a
service clouds. CloudForms supports the VMware, Microsoft and Amazon platforms as well as the
Red Hat KVM and OpenStack platforms.
For customers with a substantial investment in VMware vSphere, this then boils down a choice
between vRealize Suite (vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business) vs.
CloudForms. Customers should consider the following factors in making this decision:
VRealize Suite includes extremely strong cross hypervisor and cross cloud Operations Management
functionality. CloudForms is completely missing the performance management, capacity management, log
management and self-learning analytics that are the core of a robust operations management solution.
VRealize Suite includes extremely strong cross hypervisor and cross cloud automation functionality.
CloudForms is missing support for Hyper-V, and is missing the ability to deliver full multi-tier applications
as a service.
VRealize Suite includes strong business management functionality in the form of vRealize Business which
delivers accurate cost analyses across private, hybrid and public clouds. CloudForms is completely missing
this functionality.
In summary, the VMware vRealize Suite is a mature set of capabilities for managing all three layers
of cloud services (infrastructure, platform and application) across private and hybrid clouds today.
VRealize Suite will be the first management suite to be able to manage the VMware Software
Defined Data Center and combinations of private, hybrid and pubic clouds. Enterprises who have a
substantial investment in vSphere and who intend to capitalize upon the extended benefits of the
SDDC, VMware vCloud Air and other public clouds should choose vRealize Suite to manage the
environments.

RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management
The RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management suite consists of the following components:
RightScale Self-Service is a portal for developers, application teams, and business users to provision
applications and technology stacks into cloud environments.
RightScale Cloud Management is a management solution that enables IT teams to manage applications in
the cloud and create policies that govern the use of cloud resources across the enterprise.
RightScale Cloud Analytics provides a dashboard for technical, business, and financial users to visualize,
forecast, and optimize cloud spend.
RightScale Multi-Cloud Platform is the foundation of RightScale CPM, providing a single connection
point and API that spans a wide variety of public and private clouds as well as virtualized
environments.
RightScale therefore seeks to be an operational and cloud management layer on top of the
hypervisors and cloud management solutions that it supports. It offers a robust set of functionality,
but this comes at a steep price, which is that services built to take advantage of RightScale are
locked into the RightScale API and templates making it very difficult to migrate those applications
and services away from RightScale.

RightScale is also missing the following key cloud and operations management capabilities present
in vRealize Suite:
vRealize Suite.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow offers a set of SaaS delivered IT automation solutions. The most common usage of
ServiceNow is of the Service Now Service Desk which allows IT organizations to automate an ITIL
compliant process for managing requests and tickets.
ServiceNow has recently added Cloud Provisioning and Orchestration modules to its offering which
allow IT organizations to automate the provisioning of infrastructure services on VMware vSphere
and Amazon environments from a service catalog.
While the integration of basic provisioning tasks with the rest of ITs ITIL process management is
interesting, the provisioning and management capabilities of ServiceNow lag far behind those
currently in the VMware vRealize Suite. The VMware vRealize Suite has the current and likely future
advantages over the ServiceNow offering:
VRealize Suite includes Operations Management capabilities which are not present in the ServiceNow
offering.
VRealize Suite includes the ability to deliver application platforms and applications themselves as a service
which is not present in the ServiceNow offering.
As VMware progresses in the delivery of the Software Defined Data Center, vRealize Suite will be far ahead
of ServiceNow in the ability to manage the SDDC and allow customers to realize the full benefits of the
SDDC.
In summary, automating the management of the Service Desk and automating the management of
an enterprise grade private and hybrid cloud which is heading in the direction of the Software

Defined Data Center are two different things. Adding provisioning and orchestration features to a
service desk management offering is not the right way to approach cloud management or the
management of the SDDC. The VMware vRealize Suite is far better positioned to provide the needed
capabilities than is ServiceNow.
VIII. Cloud Management Solutions Comparison Table

The table below compares VMware vRealize Automation, a component of vRealize Suite, to the
direct competitors of the vRealize Automation product. It should be noted that none of the direct
competitors of vRealize Automation are available in a comprehensive cloud management suite like
vRealize Suite from VMware.
The product does not implement the capability
The product partially implements the capability
The product fully implements the capability

IX. Comparison of Microsoft and VMware Management Suites
VMware and Microsoft are the only two major software vendors that offer both a virtualization
platform and a management suite that spans operations management and cloud management. An
enterprise with only one of either the VMware vSphere or the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization
platform has an easy decision to make as to from which vendor to get core operations management
and cloud management capabilities.
The challenge for enterprise customers is how to effectively manage combinations of VMware
vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, and in particular create operationally efficient clouds that span
these two virtualization platforms. This is a particular challenge when customers have not only a
substantial investment in both virtualization platforms, but have a substantial investment in VMware
vSphere and the Windows operating system and the Windows applications running on those
operating systems.
Microsoft Strengths
The System Center family of solutions (System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), Systems Center
Configuration Manager (SCCM), and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) are solutions
for managing the Windows operating system on physical and virtual platform, as well as for
managing the workloads running on the Windows operating system. From a licensing perspective,
Microsoft has retired its previous Enrollment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) and replaced it with the
new Server and Cloud Enrollment offering. The new SCE offering is designed to make it easy for
customers to migrate their workloads off of their on-premise data center and onto Microsoft Azure.
The comparison of the old ECI and new SCE offerings is shown below.

The Microsoft SCM offering is strongest and most appealing to customers who have 100% Windows
environments and who are using 100% Microsoft Hyper-V as the virtualization platform. Through the
SCVMM component of System Center, Microsoft also has the ability to do basic administration of the
vSphere platform. However as VMware brings its SDDC to market, Microsoft will have to go through
an entire major release of the System Center suite in order to incorporate support for the
incremental capabilities that VMware will add with the SDDC. Therefore even though it claims full
support of the VMware environment, ECI will likely only be a best of class management offering for
Microsoft focused environments.
VMware Strengths
VMware brings the following strengths to the Cloud Management market with respect to Microsoft:
VMware vSphere is the market leading virtualization platform. While some customers have chosen to have
more than one virtualization platform, they continue to rely upon VMware for the virtualization of their
business critical and performance critical workloads.
Through vCloud Air, VMware offers customers a hybrid cloud offering that is 100% compatible with the
market leading on premise vSphere platform. The migration of workloads from vSphere to Azure is a non-
trivial undertaking.

With the VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager, customers can manage both VMware vSphere and
Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines from the vCenter console. SCOM has no ability to manage vSphere
virtual machines without a management pack from Veeam.
vRealize Operations (with the use of the Hyperic Agent) does a better job of providing operations
management capabilities for Windows and Hyper-V environments than SCOM does in terms of monitoring
the VMware environment. In fact, SCOM is unable to monitor a VMware environment without the assistance
of a third party management pack from Veeam.
VMware vRealize Operations includes state of the art self-learning performance analytics which eliminate
the need to set manual thresholds, tune them and maintain them for hundreds of operations metrics.
Microsoft has no similar capability in SCOM.
With vRealize Log Insight, VMware has the ability to ingest and analyze real time event streams from the
virtualization platform. The integration of vRealize Log Insight with vRealize Operations then gives the
latter the ability to do real time infrastructure performance management of the virtualized environment
for which Microsoft has no commensurate capability.
VMware vRealize Automation has far greater customer traction as an automation and self-service platform
than does Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). In particular, vRealize Automation
has proven deployments of private and hybrid clouds that span VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
resource pools. SCVMM is an extremely rudimentary first generation product which only offers basic
automation of infrastructure services (IaaS). vRealize Automation also has much broader support for
different cloud platforms like Amazon and clouds running on other hypervisors.
vRealize Automation includes the ability to encapsulate entire N-tier application systems into manageable
containers, deploy them in various environments, and manage their lifecycles.
Microsoft has no offering comparable to vRealize Suite which includes Operations Management, Self-
Learning Analytics, Log Management, Configuration Management, Cloud Automation, Chargeback, and
Cross-Cloud Costing.
Choosing a Cross-Platform Management Suite

Given the above relative strengths and weaknesses the following strategy is recommended for
customers depending upon their situation:
For customers with exclusively a Windows operating system and Hyper-V environment, and whose needs
for scale and functionality will not drive their needs for current vSphere or future SDDC functionality,
System Center is an appropriate management solution for Windows, Hyper-V and the Windows
applications.
For customers with exclusively a VMware vSphere virtualization platform, and a heavy investment in
Windows operating systems and Windows applications, a hybrid approach is called for. SCOM is an
appropriate choice to manage the Windows operating systems and applications (particularly the Microsoft
provided Windows applications like Sharepoint, Exchange and SQL Server). However SCOM is weak when it
comes to managing vSphere. For this reason, customers with a heavy investment in vSphere should use
vRealize Suite for Operations Management, Cloud Management, and Cross-Cloud Costing.

For customers with both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms, again a hybrid approach is
called for if the customer has a heavy investment in Windows operating systems and applications. SCOM is
an appropriate choice to manage the Windows operating systems and Windows applications. But due to the
fact that vRealize Suite does a better job of supporting Hyper-V, than SCOM does of supporting vSphere,
vRealize Suite should be used as the cross virtualization platform operations management and cloud
management solution.

X. Management Suite Comparison Table
The table below compares the management functionality of the Microsoft Enrollment for Core
Infrastructure (Windows Server 2012 + System Center 2012 SP1 (SCOM, SCVMM, SCCSPP) with the
VMware vRealize Suite (vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business).

In conclusion, vRealize Suite offers both considerable depth of functionality and support for a
breadth of environments that are not matched by Microsofts offerings. Enterprises with substantial
commitments to only vSphere or with commitments to vSphere, Hyper-V and Windows should
standardize upon vRealize Suite to manage, vSphere, Hyper-V and Windows.
XI. About VMware

VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to
thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build,
deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based
on their specific needs. With 2013 revenues of $5.21 billion, VMware has more than 500,000
customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices
throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.
XII. About The Virtualization Practice

The Virtualization Practice is an industry analyst firm focusing upon data center virtualization and
cloud computing. Bernd Harzog is TVPs Analyst for Cloud Management focusing on the Operations,
Applications, and Cloud Management layers of the Software Defined Data. Bernd was formerly a
Gartner Group Research Director focusing on the Windows Server operating system, CEO of RTO
Software, and VP of Products at Netuitive, and has been involved in vendor and IT strategy since
1980.


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The Virtualization Practice

2014 The Virtualization Practice. All Rights Reserved.

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

II. Legacy Management Approaches ............................................................................. 2

Heavyweight Legacy Management Frameworks ................................................................ 2

Silos of Non-Integrated Management Tools ....................................................................... 2

ITIL Based Processes and Products................................................................................... 2

III. SDDC and Cloud Management Challenges .............................................................. 3

Dynamic Operating Environments ...................................................................................... 3

Scaled Out (not Up) Deployment Models ........................................................................... 3

Distributed (Cloud) Deployment Models ............................................................................. 3

Agile Development .............................................................................................................. 4

IV. The VMware vRealize Management Suite ................................................................. 4

V. Point Operations Management Solutions ................................................................. 6

IBM, BMC, CA, HP Legacy Frameworks ............................................................................ 6

CA Unified Infrastructure Management............................................................................... 7

Dell Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition ............................................................... 7

Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) ................................................... 8

VI. Operations Solutions Comparison Table ............................................................... 15

VII. Point Cloud Management Solutions ........................................................................ 16

A Note on OpenStack ....................................................................................................... 16

BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager ......................................................................................... 17

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

CSC Agility Platform.......................................................................................................... 18

Dell Cloud Manager .......................................................................................................... 19

IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack ................................................................................ 23

Red Hat CloudForms ........................................................................................................ 24

RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management .......................................................................... 25

VIII. Cloud Management Solutions Comparison Table................................................. 27

IX. Comparison of Microsoft and VMware Management Suites............................... 28

Microsoft Strengths ........................................................................................................... 28

Choosing a Cross-Platform Management Suite................................................................ 30

X. Management Suite Comparison Table .................................................................... 32

XI. About VMware............................................................................................................. 33

XII. About The Virtualization Practice ............................................................................ 33

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

II. Legacy Management Approaches

Silos of Non-Integrated Management Tools

ITIL Based Processes and Products

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

III. SDDC and Cloud Management Challenges

Scaled Out (not Up) Deployment Models

Distributed (Cloud) Deployment Models

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

IV. The VMware vRealize Management Suite

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

IBM, BMC, CA, HP Legacy Frameworks

These legacy frameworks consist of the following operations management components:

IBM - the Tivoli product line

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

CA Unified Infrastructure Management

Dell Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.

2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved.