Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation is a Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solution designed to improve the economics of virtualized data centers with an intelligent software platform, which increases performances and decreases costs.
Eco4Cloud Workload Consolidation works on top of a virtualization platform, and uses the exposed API to connect to the platform and optimize the workload placement in a virtual farm in order to make it more…
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Veeam ONE
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Veeam ONE is virtualization management technology from Ohio based VMware partner Veeam Software.
Eco4Cloud is well suited in VMware farms that have standard VM deployments, especially with small VMs, with nothing blocking vMotion and hardware fully compatible with IPMI 2.0 (minimum). It doesn't work well if many VMs are nodes in a Microsoft cluster because they would be unmovable and therefore their host would never be put in stand-by mode. If every host in the cluster has at least one guest VM that is a node of a Microsoft cluster, no host in the cluster will ever be put in stand-by mode.
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
It consolidates workloads in VMware clusters using an algorithm that seems to work better than VMware DRS. It keeps headroom for workload peaks and to withstand the number of host failures set for the cluster in vCenter.
If the workload is very variable, Eco4Cloud will not continuously turn a host on and off but it will settle to keep the host running. It sort of "rightsizes" the cluster keeping only the right number of hosts running. This is another main difference when comparing Eco4Cloud with VMware DRS/DPM which strictly follows the workload and sometimes isn't fast enough in turning on the hosts when the workload is ramping-up.
To do a good job Eco4Cloud needs to analyze the hosts and the VMs. Therefore, the troubleshooting component of Eco4Cloud can figure out if there are problems in the configuration of the hosts (e.g. vMotion settings). It can also determine if a VM is stuck and can't vMotion (e.g. using the physical CD-ROM) or if it's oversized or undersized.
Something Eco4Cloud has and others don't is a technology named Smart Ballooning. With Smart Ballooning Eco4Cloud recovers unused RAM from the VMs and gives it back to the host way before the host goes over the 94% RAM threshold. This allows us to reach higher levels of overbooking.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
Basically the products works very well and we have been very pleased, but following are some picky details I could suggest for improvement specific to our needs.
We leave the GUI up on a TV in our Office and on our desktops to visibly see if anything is alerting. It would be nice if you could customize the view to have a smaller minimum view with just the widgets you wanted.
When the GUI starts on a multi-monitor setup it always returns to the primary and any popup windows always go to the primary instead of the monitor you have the application running in.
The software is a joy to use. The user interface is good overall and you can find frequently needed things easily and quickly. Some less frequently needed things eg. settings are hidden under several menus and one might have to look for those for a while. We also haven't had any issues with the products reliability.
Support, as mentioned earlier, is often slow to respond for Veeam ONE requests. To Veeam's credit, they will work on an issue until they find a solution, and will even develop a specific hotfix for your environment if one is needed, but response time is just slow.
We compared the consolidation feature and we obtained exactly the same amount of servers in stand-by. The main difference was that Eco4Cloud turned off the unneeded hosts in 2 days while VMTurbo Operations Manager required one day per host. This behavior is caused by the different algorithms implemented by these two products. Compared to Eco4Cloud, VMware DRS/DPM was very aggressive (we tried it in vSphere 5.0). We haven't tested it with vSphere 6 yet.
Veeam One is very easy to use, easy to configure and get what you want. The integration for Veeam Backup is perfect, for today i think Veeam need to make Veeam One monitor Microsoft 365 envirioment, this will give great imput and integrated with Veeam Backup for 365 will be amezing.
The most valuable reports can safe us a lot of headaches and downtime. What used to be an emergency once in a while is an afterthought as we proactively prevent those same issues in less than 5 minutes a week.
The simplicity has allowed us to offload some virtual environment monitoring to a junior associate.
Initial deployment took some time because we couldn't get licensing figured out, but it has been smooth sailing since then.
