Apache CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director

CloudStack is well suited if you want to keep the costs low and still need a reliable and robust tool to cloud virtualization orchestration. The end user interface is friendly so users can find and use functionalities quickly. Also, the newer version allows you to integrate CloudStack with external authentication using SAML for single sign-on. It can be less appropriate for an administrator that does not want to do a lot of interventions using a command line or that does not use the Linux operating system.

Incentivized

For a CSP it's the best choice. For internal uses, even in presence of different business units, it's not so easy and flexible to manage. It assures a high level of multitenancy, often not needed for internal purposes. But it could be used in this case, just not created for these purposes. Network management is great.

Incentivized

• New functionalities
• Fixing bugs
• Private and public clouds

• Manages multi-tenancy very well. You can setup resource pools of compute, network, and storage that are independent of each other.
• Easy to create and manage multiple environments.
• Has lease management technology and can easily set leases and expire them based on pre-configured time frames.

Incentivized

• Maintenance tools
• Less command line interventions
• Server logs not so friendly
• Upgrades are not so straightforward
• The graphical interface performance in big environments can get a little bit slow

Incentivized

• Logging, there is a lot of logging but is not always clear where to look for the right logging.
• The syncing of policy, you can't see if or what he did/didn't sync and the status of it.
• More integrations with VMware product (click like Availability)

Incentivized

The University, my first large implementation, had a big issue with 149 small data centers spread on São Paulo State, this data centers costs to university were very high, the consolidation idea in two data centers were awesome, but were worried with the management, so we adopted ACS to management of all 576 physical hosts. Now a days the university is delivering IaaS for all staff, students, teachers and researchers, they are using these resources to delivery services to their clients and have a great results in research area

Another option was own scripting or maintaining the end users in the backend (vcenter). This costs to much time to maintain (scripting) and has a big change of a Security breach. It was not an option for us either way.

Incentivized

• Minimal impact at migration from the earlier solution used (Citrix CloudPortal), once both solutions have a common kernel.
• Reduction to 0 with payment of software license.

• vCloud Director requires less IT administration. For example, there isn't a need to maintain esx host. or storage administration like creating luns.
• A negative impact is cost. vCloud Director has a monthly cost for storage, processor core, memory, and licensing.

Incentivized