Rackspace Fabric vs. VMware Cloud Director

In the case of our non working hours, this service is excellent. Since the service auto creates a support ticket for the Rackspace team in case of a service being down, the support team can work on a support ticket and fix the issue for us. This is all automated and we don't even need to be involved most of times.

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

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

Incentivized

• 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

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

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

I've used Google/Amazons web services. They both make it easy to accidentally incur bills for things you didn't know were billable (or forgot about). Rackspace makes it extremely clear and doesn't lure you in with so many free trials that try to lock you in at a later time

Incentivized

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

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized

• 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