Difference between FusionSphere and VMware

Hello, everyone!

I have summarized some comparison points between Huawei FusionSphere and VMware for you. However, my data here is not comprehensive.

Introduction of FusionSphere

Huawei FusionCompute virtualization suite is an industry-leading virtualization solution. This solution significantly improves data center infrastructure efficiency and provides the following benefits for customers:

• Improve infrastructure resource utilization in data centers.

• Significantly accelerate service rollout.

• Substantially reduce power consumption in data centers.

• Leverage high availability (HA) and powerful restoration capabilities of virtualized infrastructure to provide rapid fault recovery for services, thereby cutting data center costs and increasing system runtime.

The FusionCompute virtualization suite virtualizes hardware resources using the virtualization software deployed on physical servers, so that one physical server can function as multiple virtual servers. This solution maximizes resource utilization by centralizing existing VMs workloads on some servers and therefore releasing more servers to carry new applications and solutions.

Introduction to Huawei FusionSphere

Introduction of VMware

Software-defined data centers (SDDC): provides private cloud and enterprise data center solutions. 

vCloud Air™: federates, consolidates, and connects customers' private clouds or data centers and the public clouds provided by VMware itself or its certified partners and provides unified management, orchestration, networking, and security modeling.

Virtual Workspace: provides the VMware Horizon Suite for desktop virtualization and mobile computing. Horizon Suite consists of VMware Horizon View, VMware Horizon Workspace, and VMware Horizon Mirage.

VMware's three key strategies

1. FT function: 

vSphere 6.0 breaks limitations of the FT function provided in earlier versions on the number of vCPUs, hardware virtualization, and virtual disk formats, meeting commercial use requirements. 

2. VM migration: 

VM migration is not subject to limits and boundaries, allowing services to move throughout the infrastructure in different regions. 

3. Virtual Volume:

•Disk arrays are aware of VMs and its virtual volumes. 

•ESXi does not handle VM storage I/O, and the I/O operations are offloaded to disk arrays. 

•VVOL provides better I/O performance and higher QoS than VMFS-based storage virtualization.  A total of 16 vendors claimed to support VVOLs. 

Difference between FusionSphere and VMware

1. Cloud vs. virtualization: VMware mostly sells vSphere (occupying 80%), rather than a cloud service system. Cloud features are not included in vSphere so that you need to separately buy high-cost vRealize to achieve these features. Huawei FC+FM solution includes the cloud service features, such as VDC and self-service. 

2. Openness vs. close: VMware is not a gold member of the OpenStack community and uses a closed-off architecture that differs from mainstream architecture. It holds a negative attitude towards the openness of technology.

Advantages and Disadvantages of FusionSphere

The FusionCompute virtualization engine supports large-capacity clusters and supports multiple hardware devices, allowing carriers and enterprises to flexibly select hardware platforms. In addition, IT resource scheduling, heat management, and energy consumption management are integrated and centralized, reducing maintenance costs. It also supports cross-domain resource management and centralized management of network-wide resources. In addition, services are controllable and manageable in terms of charging, improving the operation efficiency of the entire system. In addition, accurate charging is performed for different service types to help customers achieve refined operation.

FusionManager supports management of physical devices, such as subracks, servers, storage devices, and switches, and can be flexibly deployed on VMs or dedicated physical servers. It also provides a visualized application deployment template design tool. Administrators can quickly deploy applications by creating templates. In addition, it provides the service catalog management function for administrators to quickly provision applications based on service templates. It also provides open northbound APIs, which are more convenient to use.

Advantages and Disadvantages of VMware

VMware has the freedom to configure and modify the operating environment it needs to learn and experiment with without fear of crashing the system, which is useful for technicians who need to salvage and validate multi-operating system data. In addition, VMware uses virtual machines to implement multi-system operations, which brings economic benefits and convenience to users compared with building multiple operating system platforms. In addition, the CPU usage of VMware is less than that of other VM software, regardless of whether the operating system is installed or used on the VMware. In terms of network settings, VMware provides more network types than other software. But VMware's downside is that it's free and expensive.

Based on the preceding introduction, you can understand the advantages and disadvantages of Huawei virtualization and VMware virtualization. In fact, the two virtualization systems are well-known in the industry. You can select them based on your requirements.

That's all, thanks!