Research Report Vmware Vs. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: a Market, Function, Price Discussion

Research Report VMware vs. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: A Market, Function, Price Discussion

The Objective of This Report The objective of this report is to provide information technology (IT) buyers with insight into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), as well to provide IT buyers with a features/function/price comparison of VMware vs. RHEV hypervisors, infrastructures, and management environments. Key Findings The key findings in this report include:  VMware and RHEV (and their ecosystems) both offer similar (but not identical) functionality when it comes to performing the functions required by most IT managers;  When comparing VMware to RHEV (using the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization infrastructure/management implementation compared to VMware on Red Hat Linux) a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment can cost approximately 28% less to purchase and maintain as compared with a VMware environment; and,  In a 200 server, two-socket configuration, a typical Red Hat user could save over a million dollars using a KVM approach as compared with a VMware approach.

The big question on the table when it comes to comparing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware is: “Is the extra price premium that VMware demands for its licenses worth the investment — or can the same functions be accomplished using less expensive Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?”

Executive Summary Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the commercial distribution of the open source KVM (kernel- based virtual machine) hypervisor combined with the oVirt virtual infrastructure management environment. It competes with EMC’s VMware vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and other server virtualization implementations.

When comparing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to VMware, we believe that IT buyers should look closely at:

1. Marketshare trends (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is growing; VMware is declining); 2. Features/functions (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware offer comparable features/functions); and, 3. Price and service/support costs.

Marketshare Growth Trends When it comes to marketshare trends, it appears that VMware marketshare — due to increasing competition — is now on the decline. Meanwhile, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization share, though small now, appears to be gaining steam as the RHEV infrastructure and management stacks have become broader and deeper, and as a rich ecosystem supported by over 250 vendors has evolved.

VMware vs. RHEV: A Market/Function/Price Discussion

Comparative Features/Functions VMware vSphere offers a rich suite of infrastructure and management products that complement its ESXi virtualization hypervisor. Further, VMware has an extensive ecosystem of 3rd party software products. But, likewise, Red Hat (the enterprise Linux leader) offers Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization infrastructure and management extensions — and also has an extensive ecosystem of 3rd party software products that can be used to add additional features and functions to the base RHEV offering.

Our research shows that it is possible to create functionally equivalent virtualization environments using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and 3rd party software as compared with a VMware stack (hypervisor, infrastructure, and management offerings) and VMware ecosystem products.

Note: we did find some distinct performance differences between Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware (RHEV has an advantage in performance — both RHEV and VMware support the same number of cores — but RHEV appears to perform better). VMware, on the other hand, has certain storage integration advantages (as should be expected from a company owned by storage giant EMC). But, when it comes to building, provisioning, deploying and managing virtual machines, we find both products to be close in terms of functionality.

Pricing/Service and Support Costs The primary difference between VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can be found in license pricing and service/support costs. In short, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is open source software offered on a subscription model. There is no perpetual license charge. Instead, customers purchase a subscription which includes updates and support. VMware charges a perpetual license fee plus service subscription for its products. Both vendors’ actual service and support fees are very similar — so the primary difference comes down to VMware license costs. The Remainder of This Report The remainder of this Research Report takes a closer look at how VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization compare on the basis of market trends, features/functions and cost. These comparisons are made by comparing a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization /Linux-only deployment to a VMware Linux-only deployment (both are compared on x86 architecture because VMware and KVM run only on x86 architecture).

Background VMware (the market leader in server virtualization) was founded in 1998, and has more than a decade to expand its product offerings and ecosystem. The KVM hypervisor, on the other hand, was released as part of Linux 2.6.20 (in February, 2007) — and for the past five years the open source community has been expanding KVM functionality. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, combining KVM and a management system, was initially released in November 2009.

Although RHEV arrived to market over 10 years after the founding of VMware, RHEV has been able to rapidly “catch-up” in terms of functionality largely due to the efforts of Red Hat and numerous other vendors (over 250 vendors in total) that have enriched the basic open source KVM implementation while at the same time growing the RHEV and KVM infrastructure and management environments. These vendors have banded together to form “the Open Virtualization Alliance” — an organization chartered with driving awareness of the open source KVM virtualization scheme, driving KVM adoption, fostering a KVM ecosystem, encouraging KVM interoperability — and with promoting best practices (including highlighting customer success stories). Further, the open source community is also participating in the oVirt project — a project that aims to expand open source KVM infrastructure and management and is the basis for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization combines KVM and oVirt into a supported enterprise distribution.

The Marketshare Discussion When it comes to market projections in the virtual machine marketplace, Clabby Analytics has been down this path before. In July, 2008, we forecast that Microsoft’s Hyper-V would start to gain significant marketshare against VMware (see this report). And, as the Gartner data describe in this news report, VMware marketshare is shrinking. We now believe that KVM is positioned just as Hyper-V was a few years ago. Its functionality has been greatly improved — and its cost is advantage is becoming almost irresistible (KVM licenses are free).

Clabby Analytics attended Red Hat’s annual summit meeting in Boston last month — and we spoke with RHEV and KVM users as well as fellow research analysts. KVM users, for the most part, have been experimenting with KVM. But there were enough KVM users in attendance for us to consider the market to be “seeded for growth”, with plenty of KVM opportunities that are about ready to go into production. Plus, fellow researchers at IDC indicated that they believe that KVM may already have a 4% marketshare. Given these circumstances, we expect that KVM marketshare will triple in marketshare (to 12%) by 2014.

Other Factors That Will Contribute to the Rise in RHEV Adoption We believe that four factors will cause the RHEV adoption rate to triple by 2014. They are:

1. IT buyers are discovering that RHEV functionality matches VMware in functionality; 2. Current RHEV testers are planning to move from RHEV proof-of-concept testing into production mode; 3. VMware buyers are unhappy with VMware premium pricing — which will cause some of VMware’s base to gravitate to RHEV for cost reasons (RHEV charges no upfront license — VMware license costs alone can mount into the millions of dollars); and, 4. An increase in RHEV deployment by buyers who prefer to use open source software.

RHEV vs. VMware: A Functional Discussion As stated earlier, RHEV and VMware are functionally equivalent — but they are not identical. There are areas of comparison where RHEV has a distinct edge — and areas where VMware has a competitive advantage. And there are some “grey” areas.

As we look to compare RHEV vs. VMware functionality, our primary concerns are in virtual machine headroom (scalability), the integration of virtual machine and storage management, and virtual network facilities. A head to head comparison shows that KVM offers more vCPUs per virtual machine (VM) than VMware. VMware offers live storage migration — which RHEV currently does not. But, for the most part, these products compare well when performing the functions that IT managers are looking most for such as live migration (the ability to move live workloads to other servers); high availability (the ability to fail-over should a problem occur); and workload balancing (such that servers do not bog down). Other desired functionality includes page sharing and memory compression. Figure 1 (next page) shows a few virtual servers, storage and network comparison points.

It should be noted that some functions that are offered by VMware, such as storage I/O load monitoring shown in the “storage support” row in Figure 1 are not currently offered as part of RHEV packaging. But this does not mean that this kind of functionality cannot be found in the RHEV ecosystem (additional products that enable RHEV to make better use of storage are available in the open source ecosystem). The difference, however, is that VMware integrates such

July, 2012 © 2012 Clabby Analytics Page 3 VMware vs. RHEV: A Market/Function/Price Discussion support, whereas the RHEV community, at this juncture, has not. These differences aside, it is our belief that RHEV and VMware are very close functionally — except when it comes to performance per core.

Figure 1: VMware vs. RHEV — General Comparison Points

VMware vSphere 5 Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0

Perf/Scale of Hypervisor 32 Virtual CPUs, 1 TB of 64 Logical (Virtual CPUs) per Host, 2 TB memory per VM guest, 2 TB of memory per host, 512 GB of memory per host server per VM guest Storage Support Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS shared; or local; Many storage devices supported through Storage load balancing, live ecosystem storage migration, thin provisioning, storage I/O load monitoring Hypervisor Network Support Network I/O load All available through the KVM ecosystem monitoring, NetFlow integration for traffic flow, virtual network provisioning, private VLAN support Source: Clabby Analytics — July, 2012

Performance One of the big problems in measuring VMware performance is that VMware restricts performance measurement as part of its end user license agreement (EULA). In this VMware agreement, VMware states that “you may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study”.

For researchers such as ourselves, this VMware stipulation goes a long way in preventing customers from sharing VMware performance information with us (VMware customers don’t want the legal hassle — so why would they test and publish their results after a VMware review?).

One source of benchmark comparison data, however, is readily available — the SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark. As of January 1, 2012, Red Hat was able to claim:

 13 of the 21 published results;  The 6 highest overall scores;  The 5 highest consolidation ratios; and,  The only 8 socket scores published, including the top score with over 550 performant VMs running on a single hypervisor.

And since January, these numbers have gotten even better. In Q1 and Q2, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have been battling it out with new SPECvirt benchmarks — and none of the new results use VMware (all results reported since January have been Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM results).

To us, this shows that vendors that want to show the greatest performance and highest scalability benchmarks are opting for Red Hat over VMware.

SPECvirt is not the only indicator that RHEV scales better than VMware. Other studies note that higher virtual machine density (more virtual machines per server) can be achieved using RHEV as compared with VMware. For instance, a study conducted by “the VAR guy” (note: conducted in 2009) showed that 52 KVM virtual machines were able to run on a particular x86 configuration where only 35 VMware VMs could be supported (see here).

The reason this is important is because the more virtual machines a given server can support, the lower the cost the IT buyer needs to pay for additional servers. This saves working capital.

When it comes to performance, numerous studies (including a study by researcher Gionatan Danti found here), the InfoWorld virtualization shoot-out, and customer internal studies (including anecdotal information we learned when we talked to engineers who operate the IBM Research Compute Cloud) indicate that RHEV outperforms VMware in various virtualization scenarios. Interestingly, VMware supports the same number of cores as RHEV — but KVM performance is appears to be better (at least anecdotally — it is very hard to get VMware performance numbers due to VMware’s EULA [discussed earlier]).

We speculate that VMware performance may lag KVM performance due to schedule handling issues. Or the reason that KVM may do a better job outperforming other hypervisors could be that it does a better job of exploiting the virtualization hardware assist features in processors — and because it is so tightly integrated with the Linux operating environment.

Framing the Pricing/Cost Discussion Comparing VMware and RHEV pricing is both simple and complex. It is simple because VMware pricing is built upon license, service and support fees — while RHEV’spricing is largely based on service and support. Finding this data on the Web is easy. The complexity arises, however, in figuring out the licensing requirements for each configuration.

As an example of this complexity, consider VMware’s licensing requirements. VMware’s vSphere 5.0 is offered in three editions (standard, enterprise, and enterprise plus), each of which provides a different base entitlement for vRAM (virtual random access memory) capacity (standard edition allows 32 GB of vRAM; enterprise allows 64GB vRAM; and enterprise plus allows 96GB). These entitlements are aggregated across all CPU licenses of that edition, forming a total available pooled vRAM capacity. Customers need to either buy licenses for the total count of sockets for their particular edition — or licenses for the total vRAM on the VMs running on that edition. Further, customers need to purchase an annual service and support contract that entitles the customer to support, patches, and upgrades. These kinds of nuances make pricing analysis somewhat complex. (Incidentally, an in depth description of VMware’s pricing model can be found in this 12 page document).

Another subtlety in the RHEV camp is that Red Hat offers a 5% discount to customers who commit to a three year service and support contract. (This discount is reflected in our pricing comparison later in this section).

Still another factor that complicates cost comparison are VMware license practices around a function known as “memory overcommit”. Both RHEV and VMware offer a function known as memory over-commit (the ability of a hypervisor to provision more random access memory to virtual machines than is physically available — the over-committed memory is called vRAM).

Memory over-commit essentially provides a way to stretch memory use — and is used regularly in both VMware and RHEV environments (VMware memory over-commit is turned-on by default).

The pricing issue with memory over-commit is that VMware charges based upon the amount of vRAM being used — and RHEV does not. According to VMware’s vSphere 5 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging guide (see page 3 in VMware’s report), “when a virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured to that virtual machine counts against the pooled vRAM capacity up to a maximum of 96GB (i.e. a virtual machine with 128GB of configured vRAM will only use 96GB from the pooled vRAM capacity)… the easiest way to expand pooled vRAM capacity is to add more VMware vSphere CPU licenses of the same edition to the vRAM pool. Alternatively, customers can upgrade all CPU licenses in the vRAM pool to a VMware vSphere edition with a higher vRAM entitlement”. In short, if a customer exceeds his or her vRAM usage limit, that customer needs to buy more licenses.

The preceding paragraph shows that subtle differences in VMware pricing can have a huge impact on VMware license costs. And this illustrates why comparing VMware and RHEV can be a bit challenging. Still, those who persevere will find that the pricing difference can be huge when it comes to VMware vs. RHEV from a price/performance perspective (VMware licenses increase the ultimate price paid for VMware software; while RHEV performance advantages can lead to a requirement for fewer systems to handle the same number of workloads — leading to reduced capital spending when using RHEV).

Sources of Pricing Data We gathered all sorts of pricing data from news articles and reports, vendor websites, direct discussions with vendors; and, from other independent analysts. Of all of the news articles/reports that we viewed, our favorite feature/function/price comparison can be found on the InfoWeek site (see this InfoWeek shoot-out virtualization vendor comparison).

Vendor pricing can be readily found on the Internet — but you have to know product names and functions in order to figure out which products to price. In this case, we chose to compare VMware’s vSphere (infrastructure) and vCenter (management) environments to Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. VMware vSphere pricing can be found here; VMware vCenter pricing can be found here and here. Red Hat RHEL pricing can be found here; Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization pricing can be found here.

We also discussed VMware pricing with fellow research analyst firm Wintergreen Research (some of this data can be here). Further, we drew on some of our past reports for platform-by-platform comparative pricing, such as this report. This report shows how VMware on x86 servers compares to PowerVM virtualization on IBM Power Systems and to Linux/mainframe virtualization under IBM’s z/VM operating environment (the mainframe saves over $1,000,000 in virtualization costs in this scenario). Our Pricing Findings The server configuration that we chose to illustrate how VMware compares to Red Hat in terms of pricing consisted of a 20 server, 2-socket server Linux environment. Using this configuration, we gathered the license count/price data from each of the sources mentioned in the previous section (directly from the vendor Websites or from the vendors themselves). NOTE: We do not include the cost of the server environments in our cost comparison because that cost is static across VMware and Red Hat environments.

In the past, we have argued that an apples-to-apples comparison of VMware to Red Hat should involve some additional 3rd party management tools in order to augment Red Hat’s management environment. Red Hat management focuses on the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

July, 2012 © 2012 Clabby Analytics Page 6 VMware vs. RHEV: A Market/Function/Price Discussion guests only — whereas VMware focuses on the management of Windows guests and Linux guests on VMware. For readers who wish to see a comparison of KVM with a 3rd party management environment that enables both Linux and Windows management from a RHEV-based server environment, please read this report.

There is, however, another way to compare VMware and RHEV pricing without worrying about cross operating environment management — and that is to compare Linux on RHEV to Linux on VMware. The following comparison (Figure 1) represents such a comparison.

Figure 1 — Linux-only Environments: Red Hat vs. VMware Comparison (on a 20 Server/2 Socket Environment)

Source: Vendor Pricing Data — June, 2012

Now remember, Figure 1 illustrates a 20 2-socket server example. These savings start to escalate significantly for larger populations of servers. Imagine a 200 2-socket configuration. In this example, savings using a RHEV approach could approach $1,004,040 over a three year period! Summary Observations The way we see it, these are Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s advantages over VMware:  Pricing — In this report we showed how Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization costs approximately 28% less than VMware in Linux-only environments. The reason for this major price differential is related to license pricing (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has no upfront license fees, VMware does). 28% savings in a 20 server 2-socked environment may not seem like much — a mere $85,621 in savings over a three year period. But

multiply by 10X the number of servers and this number becomes $856,210 in savings over three years. Or consider the savings in a 400 2-socked server configuration — a mere $2,008,080 in savings… In the end, depending on the size of the deployment, moving to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can save enterprises really BIG MONEY when it comes to virtualization deployment and management.  Performance — An examination of all SPECvirt benchmarks shows that in all large 8 socket Intel-based server benchmark are based on KVM implementations. Vendors have a tendency to run benchmarks with the fastest software in order to achieve the highest performance rating. The fact that all of the 8 socket benchmarks are using KVM implementations indicates to us that KVM outperforms VMware.

From our perspective, RHEV’s pricing and scalability advantages will factor heavily in RHEV’s market acceptance over the next few years. Accordingly, we expect RHEV marketshare to triple from approximately 4% today to around 12% by 2014.

Clabby Analytics Clabby Analytics is an independent technology http://www.clabbyanalytics.com research and analysis organization. We specialize in workload Telephone: 001 (207) 846-6662 optimization, systems architectures, and application performance management. In our research reports, we publish © 2012Clabby Analytics what we believe based upon our research — and we encourage All rights reserved July, 2012 our readers to find an alternative point of view — balance the two reports, and then decide which course of action to take. Other research and analysis conducted by Clabby Analytics can be found at: www.ClabbyAnalytics.com.