Azure Virtual Machines vs. VMware vSOM (discontinued)

It's well suited to delivering information about our sports events as during the events a lot of processing power is needed and instantly becomes available by scaling out when the event is over the service can be scaled right back making massive savings. We use it for football, horse racing, Olympics games etc, it is also used when things happen in the world like right now there is a lot of concern over the Russia and Ukraine conflict, since the demand for this information is high we instantly scale to meet the demand of our news feed services. I believe up to 90% of the UK's News, sports and media information actually passes through our computer systems, we are a market leading news and information service and Azure Virtual Machines provide us with the reliability that we need so that we can provide a rock solid reliable news and information service to the world.

Incentivized

Vsphere Operation Management is suitable for automating the process of bringing up an alternate data center in case of a disaster. It also is a great way for testing your readiness of disaster. You have the ability to bring up a server in a "bubble" for testing. This way you can show your admins how the failover process will work.

Incentivized

• You can login to Azure VMs using SSO with your Azure Ad account
• Azure VMs are securely accessible from anywhere in the world, with Azure Bastion
• You can execute scripts on the VM from the Azure portal without logging in to it

Incentivized

• The best thing about VSOM is that it's built into VCenter so you only have one point of administration
• VSOM does a great job of making applications intuitive
• Re-IPing virtual machines are a must and VSOM does a great job of making this a simple process

Incentivized

• Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
• The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
• As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.

Incentivized

• The installation of VSOM is very tedious
• It uses an MS SQL database
• It should be able to adjust for hardware modifications in VCenter

Incentivized

They are very easy and intuitive, very easy to deploy

Incentivized

I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Incentivized

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Compute supports Windows, but is really geared towards Linux. You can install Windows on some Linode servers, but again, Linode is geared towards Linux. AWS does everything but is complex and can have high costs. If you want to host Windows servers in the cloud, nothing beats Azure. From licensing to management, Microsoft Azure provides the easiest way to deploy and manage Windows Servers in the cloud, especially if you utilize other Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 an Visual Studio subscriptions.

Incentivized

vSphere with Operations Management has a much better way of automating the re-IPing of servers so you can stand them up in a different environment or location. You do, however, need another way of replicating your servers to your DR site, VSOM will not do that. We used EMC Recover Point for replication.

Incentivized

• It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
• Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
• The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs

Incentivized

• In the case of a disaster, the ROI would be substantial.
• The license for VSOM is pretty expensive initially.
• Support for VSOM is terrific.

Incentivized