VMWare alternative
By leveraging KVM (Incus) and adding some of the missing functionality, MetalSoft offers a lower cost alternative to the VMWare stack. By abstracting the hypervisor and providing some of the missing features that other stacks do not yet provide such as VRA/VRO and micro-segmentation MetalSoft can help companies either transition fully from VMWare to an open source alternative or use both at the same time.
| Feature | Equivalent MetalSoft Feature |
|---|---|
| ESXI | KVM (Incus) on Ubuntu or Incus OS |
| VDS | Logical networks |
| NSX-T L2 | Logical Networks |
| NSX-T Virtual Routers | Route Domains* |
| NSX-T Distributed Firewall (micro-segmentation) | ACL support |
| VRO/VRA | MetalSoft Workflow Extensions |
| VCloud Director | Infrastructure Editor |
| VSAN | Any MetalSoft supported storage system (eg: NetApp) |
An important consideration is NSX-T microsegmentation equivalent support. The strategy MetalSoft adopts is to use the physical network for segmentation. There are significant differences between the two approaches:
- VXLAN tunnels translate to VXLAN/EVPN tunnels on the switch side. The advantage of this approach is that there is no performance penalty as the physical switches handle the encapsulation and decapsulation.
- The Distributed Firewall translates into the ACL support on the MetalSoft side. The advantage here is performance, again the traffic is handled in hardware. The dissadvantage is in the number of rules one can have which is limited by the TCAM of the switch. The switch ACLs are also not stateful and do not do connection tracking thus more rules need to be added to allow the return traffic. Also VMs within the same L2 broadcast domain need to be on different hosts for the process to function - which can be enforced via placement rules.
- Distributed Routing is implemented differently, typically via Symmetric IRB or BGP, on the switching layer. Thus there are no routing gateways in this design. The advantage is that Bare Metal hosts can be attached to the same L2 broadcast domains without any issue.
- VSAN translates into a dedicated, dissagregated storage solution such as NetApp, Pure Storage or Dell PowerStore etc. This setup is typically faster and does not affect the performance of the compute nodes. It does require extra hardware. An alternative for hyper-converged storage is Dell PowerFlex, also supported by MetalSoft.
For more details reach out to the MetalSoft team.