azure pack vs vcac

Hi Scott,

I will make some comments based on my personal experience. We have implemented both solutions for different customers in Australia, both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Windows Azure Pack

The good

-          Portal is great, same as Azure

-          Pretty simple to set up, basic implementation requires just Windows and Virtual Machine Manager.

-          Provides most of the private cloud functions customers are looking for

-          Great story for Azure public cloud integration, machine migration is seamless

-          With Hyper-V recovery manager you can use Hyper-V replicas directly to Azure and to secondary data centre

-          WAP includes Azure Service Bus

-          The Scale Out File Server architecture on the MS platform is pretty solid, scalability is not bad

-          Licensing is simple, per processor for Windows and all System Centre products.

The not so good

-          No multi tenancy

-          No ability to customise the portal

-          The chargeback is very basic, you need to implement Service Manager for detailed reports (and SM is still pretty terrible)

-          Orchestration is fairly basic, you need SCO for custom orchestration.

-          Needs SCOM for monitoring and alerting, third party ticketing integration is complex.

-          Not possible with the MS virtual networking stack to do automated provisioning of multi tier applications, virtual load balancers and VLAN provisioning.

-          Locked in to MS cloud, poor integration with other cloud vendors.

-          If customer is existing VMware customer then migration of virtual machines can require significant effort. P2V migration functionality is no longer available in VMM 2012 R2, VMware integration is limited.

vRealize Automation (AKA vCAC)

The good

-          True multi tenancy

-          SDN integration is excellent, with NSX vCAC is able to do very complex provisioning and management of network services

-          Integrates with vCentre Orchestrator, with a couple of hundred workflows available out of the box

-          Good chargeback functionality out of the box

-          Portal is somewhat customisable.

-          VMware have announced full support for OpenStack, and have an OpenStack distribution in beta

-          VMware have announced support for Docker, Jenkins and Kubernetes, so is a good platform for open source cloud application development

The not so good

-          Complex to set up

-          vCloud Air public cloud is still fairly limited availability, and currently  integration is  rudimentary.

-          VSAN v1 is fairly basic at the moment, will need to wait for vSphere v6 for significant improvements

-          Needs vCOps for monitoring and alerting

-          Licensing is complex and pricing of the solution depends on the size and complexity of the implementation

-          DR options are more complex than MS, SRM is better for Enterprise DR but is not cloud ready.

Hope this helps.

Dean Gardiner

Practice Lead – Data Centre and Cloud

Australia and New Zealand

Dell | Global Infrastructure Consulting Services

mobile +61 409315591

email Dean_Gardiner@dell.com