Whether you’re deploying a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, long-term financial and operational success often depends on how well your platform supports the blend of factors that are most important for you and your customers. Upfront and ongoing costs, reliability, scalability, security, and existing infrastructure migration and integration are just a few of the many considerations involved in choosing the right cloud solution. No matter the cloud setup, ease of management is almost always near the top of any list of must-have features. During peak performance periods, administrators’ ability to adjust resources to accommodate fluctuating demand can make the difference between happy customers using responsive apps and frustrated customers looking elsewhere for better service.
To evaluate how two leading cloud platforms compared in some aspects of administrative efficiency, we explored the time and number of steps it took to complete three common cluster administration tasks—VM upgrades, storage expansion, and policy changes—on both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus (OPP) with OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) 4.19. In addition, to see how application performance might change while we executed those cluster-level tasks, we simultaneously ran a database workload on each cluster and monitored the performance of that workload.
We found that VCF 9.0 offers some clear administrative advantages over OCP 4.19 when managing applications across the three tasks we tested. Compared to OCP, VCF took 55 percent less time to upgrade VM resources and 67 percent less time—and fewer steps—to increase storage capacity when adding a local disk. The more flexible in-place configuration capabilities of VCF 9.0 also simplified the process of changing storage policy from RAID 1 to RAID 5.
From the performance standpoint, after we finished the VM upgrades, the VCF environment delivered a 28 percent increase in database performance, while the OCP environment delivered a database performance increase of just 4 percent.
Our findings suggest that if your organization is searching for a cloud platform that can help reduce your management burden while not taking undue resources from critical workload performance, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 may be a compelling choice.
To learn more about our VCF 9.0 cluster administration comparison tests, check out the report below.
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