The virtualization market is quite competitive, with various platforms—such as VMware, Red Hat Virtualization (RHEV), and Citrix—all competing for share. However, over the last several years, VMware has continued to hold a significant position as the go-to solution for enterprise-level virtualization, being widely adopted and trusted by organizations across the globe.
When it comes to enterprise container platforms, OpenShift has established a similar dominance. Over the last couple of years, virtualization features have been integrated into OpenShift, which has made it a compelling alternative to VMware, particularly for organizations adopting container-based architectures.
This article explores the primary differences between OpenShift and VMware virtualization, looking at their technological foundations, use cases, and factors to consider when choosing the right platform for your organization.
Summary of key OpenShift and VMware virtualization concepts
The following table provides an overview of the key concepts covered in this article.
Key concept | Description |
Virtualization fundamentals | Virtualization, typically using a hypervisor, creates software-based versions of computer resources, like servers, network, and storage. Its goal is to increase efficiency and flexibility by separating these resources from the underlying hardware. |
VMware virtualization | VMware is a traditional virtualization platform that uses ESXi as a bare-metal hypervisor to run multiple virtual machines on a single server. The platform’s core components—such as ESXi, vCenter Server, and vSphere—work together to offer a wide range of advanced features like vMotion (live migration of VMs), high availability, fault tolerance, and distributed resource scheduling (DRS). |
OpenShift virtualization with KVM and KubeVirt | OpenShift virtualization lets you run virtual machines and containers together in a Kubernetes environment. It uses KVM for virtualization and KubeVirt to manage VMs like any other Kubernetes workload, giving you a single platform for both. |
OpenShift vs. VMware virtualization | OpenShift and VMware are both powerful platforms for running applications, but they follow different approaches for common virtual machine operations, such as creation, migration, and snapshotting. |
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Fundamentals of virtualization
Virtualization is a technology that allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single physical machine. The software that manages the virtualization process by virtualizing hardware resources such as virtual CPUs, virtual disks, and virtual network interfaces is known as the hypervisor. There are two types:
- Type 1 hypervisors: Also known as bare-metal hypervisors, these are installed directly on the host machine’s hardware, bypassing the need for an underlying operating system. They offer high performance and direct access to hardware resources. Examples of type 1 hypervisors include VMware ESXi, Citrix Hypervisor, and KVM.
- Type 2 hypervisors: These are also known as hosted hypervisors. They are installed as applications on top of existing operating systems, which makes them easier to install and manage, but they offer less performance than type 1 hypervisors. Examples include VMware Workstation and VirtualBox.
VMware’s role as a traditional virtualization platform
VMware ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor that provides a robust virtualization layer to abstract the physical host’s compute, storage, memory, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. The bare-metal architecture grants ESXi direct control over the physical server’s hardware resources. As a standalone hypervisor, it eliminates the need for a preinstalled OS on the host hardware, and because of its smaller footprint, ESXi uses significantly fewer resources than other advisors.
VMkernel: The foundation of ESXi
ESXi operates on the VMkernel, which is a POSIX-like operating system developed by VMware. This high-performance operating system operates directly on the ESXi host, serving as an intermediary layer between the virtual machines and the physical hardware beneath them by managing the hardware’s physical resources, including memory, processors, storage, and network controllers.
For instance, the VMkernel has a storage subsystem accommodating various host bus adapters (HBAs) such as parallel SCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel, FCoE, and iSCSI. When the system is powered on for the first time, the VMkernel identifies the devices and chooses the correct drivers. It also detects local disk drives and formats them if empty, preparing them for storing virtual machines.
ESXi architecture (source)
Each virtual machine running on ESXi functions as a complete system, isolated from others via ESXi’s virtualization layer. ESXi efficiently separates hardware resources and partitions the server into multiple secure and independent virtual machines that coexist on the same hardware.
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Resource representation in ESXi
The amount of resources allocated to a virtual machine is the amount the guest operating system will see. ESXi uses the following constructs to represent the different requirements of virtual machines:
- Memory: ESXi manages physical memory and allocates it to VMs as virtual memory. It uses advanced memory management techniques such as transparent page sharing, memory ballooning, compression, and overcommitting to help optimize memory utilization. During memory shortages, ESXi can also perform swapping by swapping memory pages out to disk to reclaim memory that is needed elsewhere.
- Compute: ESXi assigns computing resources to virtual machines as virtual CPUs (vCPUs). The VM’s operating system sees each vCPU as a single physical CPU core. Suppose the host machine has multiple CPU cores at its disposal; in that case, the vCPU is made up of a number of time slots across all available cores, allowing multiple VMs to be hosted on a smaller number of physical cores.
- Storage: ESXi uses datastores to store virtual disks for virtual machines, which are presented as virtual disks. The datastores act as storage pools that abstract the specifics of physical storage and are used to provision storage to virtual machines. The datastores are created with the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), a high-performance file system designed specifically for the storage of virtual machines.
- Networking: ESXi uses a virtual switch (vSwitch), which is a logical layer 2 switch that resides in the VM kernel and provides traffic management for VMs. The virtual ports on the vSwitch function similarly to those on a physical switch. Each virtual machine configured with a virtual network adapter utilizes one of these virtual ports on the vSwitch.
Centralized management with vCenter
In addition to the CLI, each ESXi host comes equipped with an HTML 5–based web console for performing various operations. However, without the ease of a centralized management console, it becomes difficult to keep track of and manage hosts in enterprise infrastructures with hundreds of hosts.
VMware provides a centralized management tool, vCenter Server, to efficiently manage multiple ESXi hosts within large-scale infrastructures. vCenter is meant to provide a centralized management platform and framework for all ESXi hosts and their respective VMs by allowing administrators to deploy, manage, monitor, automate, and secure a virtual infrastructure in a centralized fashion. To help provide scalability, vCenter Server leverages a backend database that stores all the data about the hosts and VMs.
High availability and fault tolerance in VMware ESXi
vCenter Server provides configuration and management capabilities, including features such as VM templates, VM customization, rapid provisioning and deployment of VMs, role-based access controls, and fine-grained resource allocation controls. It also provides the tools for more advanced features, such as vSphere vMotion, vSAN, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT).
Here is a brief explanation of some of these features:
- vMotion: vSphere vMotion, often referred to as live migration, is a feature that allows an active virtual machine to be moved from one physical ESXi host to another without needing to shut down the VM. This is an extremely powerful feature that facilitates smooth migration between two hosts, maintaining continuous availability and uninterrupted network connectivity for the VM.
- vSAN: vSAN is a storage virtualization technology that pools storage resources from multiple hosts into a single shared datastore. It aggregates local and direct-attached storage devices across a cluster to create a single data store that all hosts in the cluster can share.
- vSphere DRS: DRS vMotion enables the automatic distribution of resource utilization across various ESXi hosts within a configured cluster. It can manage the placement of each virtual machine (VM) as it powers on in the cluster, positioning it on the host that is deemed most capable of running that VM at that specific time.
- vSphere HA: The vSphere HA feature automates restarting the VMs that are active on an ESXi host when a server failure occurs. It aims to reduce unexpected downtime resulting from any hardware failures in the physical host or other infrastructure components. In the event of a failure of a physical host or storage device, vSphere HA will restart the VM, and during this time, the applications or services associated with that VM will not be accessible.
- vSphere FT: vSphere FT goes beyond HA by removing any downtime during a physical host failure. It keeps a mirrored secondary VM on a different physical host, which is synchronized with the primary VM. Every action taken on the primary (protected) VM also occurs simultaneously on the secondary (mirrored) VM. If the physical host of the primary VM fails, the secondary VM can instantly take over without any disruption in connectivity.
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OpenShift virtualization with KVM and KubeVirt
As we all know, containers are implemented via OS-level features. They share the host kernel and do not require their own operating system, so they only contain libraries and dependencies for running the application. They can run inside both bare-metal and virtual machines.
OpenShift has primarily been a containerization platform, its primary responsibility acting as a container orchestrator. Therefore, running a virtual machine is a unique proposition: How can virtual machines be run on a platform designed for running containerized workloads?
There are two major components involved in achieving this: KVM and KubeVirt.
Understanding KVM
Under the hood, OpenShift virtualization leverages the KVM hypervisor: a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a type-1 hypervisor. It is a mature technology that major cloud providers use as the virtualization backend for their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. OpenShift virtualization uses the KVM hypervisor to allow Kubernetes and KubeVirt to manage the virtual machines. As a result, the virtual machines use OpenShift’s scheduling, network, and storage infrastructure.
KVM is integrated directly into the Linux kernel; this tight integration with the kernel ensures superior performance and resource utilization. KVM consists of two essential components:
- Kernel module: The KVM kernel module is the core component overseeing the virtualization framework. It enables the host operating system to act as a type-1 hypervisor, allowing the creation and management of virtual machines. It utilizes hardware virtualization extensions to enhance memory management, device emulation, and CPU scheduling.
- User-space component: The user-space element, QEMU (for “quick emulator”), operates alongside the KVM kernel module to deliver comprehensive virtualization capabilities. QEMU functions as a user-space application that simulates hardware devices and supports the operation of virtual machines.
In the KVM architecture, every guest (virtual machine) is set up as a standard Linux process. Once KVM is installed, you can operate several guests using a different operating system image. Each virtual machine possesses private virtualized hardware, including memory, storage, and a network interface, which enables KVM to leverage all the advantages of the Linux kernel.
Understanding KubeVirt
OpenShift virtualization allows the running of virtual machines as native objects into the OpenShift container platform via the container-native virtualization technology developed upstream by the KubeVirt project. KubeVirt builds on the Kubernetes declarative model and defines VMs using a Kubernetes CRD. To Kubernetes, a VM looks just like any other containerized resource.
When discussing a VM in the context of KubeVirt, we are actually referring to a specialized Kubernetes object. The custom resource definition (CRD) for this object includes the details for the virtual machine instance (VMI), which is another custom object. This VMI represents a single running virtual machine instance and consists of two parts: The first part contains data needed for scheduling decisions, while the second section provides information about the virtual machine’s application binary interface.
At its core, a virtual machine in OpenShift operates as a pod that runs a KVM instance within a container. The Pod is linked to the VMI, which connects it to a VirtualMachine resource and serves as an interface for advanced functionalities such as migration and disk hotplug operations. The primary entity for interacting with a virtual machine is the VirtualMachine resource itself. This architecture enables KubeVirt to manage distinct VM states such as “stopped,” “paused,” and “running,” and it also facilitates the tracking and scheduling of pods across different nodes during live migration of VMs from one node to another.
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Understanding how VMs are created
The following figure illustrates the major components of this workflow.
Building blocks of OpenShift virtualization
The interaction of these components is explained further below, with numbers in parentheses corresponding to the component labels in the diagram above:
- User interaction (1): The user defines a VMI in the OpenShift cluster, detailing the VM’s specifications, such as image, memory, CPU, storage, and networking. This serves as a blueprint for the virtual machine.
- OpenShift API (2): The OpenShift cluster receives and validates the VMI definition, creating a VM custom resource definition object.
KubeVirt: KubeVirt manages the VM lifecycle within OpenShift using the following components:
- Virt Controller (3): The virt-controller monitors VMI definitions and creates an OpenShift pod for each VM. It schedules the pod on a suitable cluster node, updating the VMI with the assigned node name before passing control to the virt-handler.
- Virt Handler (4): Operating as a daemon set on each node, the virt-handler manages VMs by monitoring assigned VMI objects, creating VM instances with libvirt, tracking their state, and handling shutdowns when VMI objects are deleted.
- Virt Launcher (5): Each VMI is linked to a pod, where the virt-launcher configures internal resources for the VM’s secure operation.
- Libvirtd (6): The virt-launcher utilizes an embedded libvirtd instance to manage the VM lifecycle, interacting with the KVM hypervisor for VM creation, configuration, and termination.
Resource representation in OpenShift virtualization
The following is a brief overview of how network, compute, storage, and memory resources are presented in OpenShift virtualization:
- Compute and memory: Compute and memory resources in OpenShift virtualization are abstracted through cluster nodes, where each node can host both containerized applications and virtual machines. Administrators can define resource requests and limits for compute and memory resources, allowing for better resource management and prioritization.
- Networking: OpenShift manages virtual machine networking through Kubernetes networking constructs, allowing VMs to leverage the same networking capabilities as containerized applications. Virtual machines can be connected to virtual networks, enabling communication with other VMs and pods. To manage traffic and security, OpenShift also supports advanced networking features like network policies, load balancers, and ingress controllers.
- Storage: OpenShift virtualization uses the persistent volume framework to provide persistent storage for virtual machines. OpenShift supports various storage backends, including block and file storage, enabling VMs to access persistent volumes. Users can dynamically provision storage based on their needs, and features like snapshots and cloning are available to manage VM data effectively.
Centralized management with Web Console
The OpenShift web console offers a comprehensive, unified interface for managing the entire cluster, including virtual machines. In addition to standard VM management tasks, the console also includes real-time insights into the health and performance of all workloads.
High availability and fault tolerance in OpenShift
OpenShift is designed with features like high availability integrated into its architecture. It does not require external tools to implement these functions.
A standard OpenShift cluster comprises several control plane nodes that maintain cluster operations even during failures. The multiple node architecture ensures uninterrupted cluster operations in the event of a node failure. OpenShift also includes a consistent key-value store (etcd) that maintains cluster data. The etcd daemon runs on each control-plane node and requires a majority consensus to achieve a quorum. OpenShift supports failure domain platforms for cloud environments such as AWS and Azure.
Comparing the OpenShift and VMware ESXi platforms
While both OpenShift and VMware ESXi are powerful virtualization platforms, they use significantly different techniques to achieve the same goal. As explained earlier, OpenShift is a container orchestration platform that leverages containerization to implement virtualization. In contrast, VMware ESXi focuses on virtualizing entire operating systems, providing a more traditional approach to infrastructure management.
The following sections will explain the differences in the major components and terminologies between the two technologies.
Management and operations
ESXi and OpenShift include both CLI and GUI options to manage virtual machines.
Graphical console
VMware ESXi includes a built-in HTML 5 web console that can be accessed via browser to manage the ESXi hosts. OpenShift provides a web based console that provides a unified view of the entire OpenShift cluster, including VMs and other resources. This offers a centralized view of the whole cluster, simplifying management tasks without needing an external tool.
Command line
ESXi also consists of a CLI (esxcli), accessed via SSH, that performs administrative operations. Furthermore, vCenter allows the management of multiple ESXi hosts from a single window. It also provides CLI tools such oc and virtctl that can interact with the cluster’s API to manage virtual machines.
Enterprise networking features
VMware offers NSX, which facilitates network virtualization, while OpenShift features support for various network plugin providers such as OpenShift SDN, OVN-Kubernetes, and Kuryr. The OVN-Kubernetes provider, which runs the Open vSwitch (OVS) plug-in on each node, is selected by default during the installation process.
Multitenancy and segmentation
NSX enables network segmentation and isolation that are suitable for multitenant environments through the use of virtual networks. On the other hand, OpenShift accomplishes network multitenancy and isolation by utilizing namespaces and network policies, which can be further enhanced with advanced network segmentation and isolation options like the operator-based Calico CNI plugin.
Security
NSX offers stateful firewalls and IDS/IPS capabilities. OpenShift is secure by design and can be enhanced even further through Advanced Cluster Security (ACS) for compliance monitoring, vulnerability management, and network segmentation.
Load balancing
NSX offers load balancing features that encompass L7 capabilities, SSL offloading, and sophisticated traffic management options. OpenShift employs routes for accessing resources outside the cluster while providing built-in load balancing. Additionally, it can connect with external load balancers offered by cloud service providers. For enhanced traffic management beyond its native Service Mesh, OpenShift can integrate with service mesh technologies like Istio.
Storage integration
Connection to backend storage
OpenShift and VMware ESXi have different methodologies for managing virtual machine storage. ESXi communicates directly with physical storage devices, such as storage arrays. In contrast, OpenShift utilizes the Container Storage Interface (CSI) to connect with the underlying storage systems.
Managing storage resources
ESXi formats the available storage using VMFS and enables a shared datastore that is accessible to all virtual machines. On the other hand, OpenShift employs storage classes to define storage features, including quality of service, throughput, and the technology that the underlying data services provide.
Advanced storage options
ESXi virtual machines can also leverage vVols, which utilize the virtual SCSI stack. Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) represent another approach, allowing VMs to access volumes on a storage array directly. In OpenShift, the connection of a storage volume to a virtualization pod, follows a 1:1 mapping, similar to how vVols and RDMs establish direct mappings.
Dynamic provisioning
OpenShift supports dynamic provisioning of volumes through CSI drivers. VMware uses vVols for the same process.
High availability and fault tolerance
ESXi depends on external tools for high availability, whereas OpenShift has integrated features for the same purpose.
Clustering
By default, ESXi hosts are standalone and require vCenter for clustering capabilities. Single-node setups can be utilized for testing, but OpenShift clusters typically comprise multiple nodes in enterprise settings.
High availability
OpenShift can automatically identify cluster node failures and relocate VMs to healthy cluster nodes, thus maintaining application availability. In contrast, vSphere HA restarts virtual machines on different hosts within the cluster if a host fails.
Fault tolerance
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) enables VMs to operate in sync on different hosts, offering continuous availability without downtime. This ensures no data loss during a host failure, as the secondary VM remains perfectly aligned with the primary one. While OpenShift does not have a direct counterpart to VMware’s Fault Tolerance, it can achieve similar outcomes through its built-in capabilities, which include load balancing, readiness and liveness probes, sticky sessions, watchdog services, and machine health checks.
Scheduling
OpenShift uses Kubernetes scheduling capabilities to manage the placement of VMs across cluster nodes based on resource availability, constraints, user-defined policies, and affinity rules. For VMware ESXi, DRS automatically balances workloads across hosts in a cluster based on resource utilization and affinity rules.
Disaster recovery and business continuity
OpenShift virtualization provides two central disaster recovery (DR) approaches via ACM:
- Metropolitan Disaster Recovery (Metro-DR) utilizes synchronous replication, ensuring that data is simultaneously written to both the primary and secondary sites and always in sync.
- Regional Disaster Recovery (Regional-DR) employs asynchronous replication, which synchronizes data from the primary site to the secondary site at regular intervals.
VMware SRM provides automated orchestration for DR, allowing for both active-passive and active-active configurations. It integrates with vSphere Replication to facilitate VM replication and failover processes to the secondary site.
Migration compatibility
Exporting and importing disk images
OpenShift uses the QCOW2 format for virtual machine disk images, whereas VMware uses the VMDK format for its virtual disks. The qemu-img tool can be used to convert QCOW2 to VMDK format and vice versa, allowing the importation of virtual machines on both platforms. However, this approach might yield mixed results due to potential variations in different versions of qemu-img.
Migration toolkit
VMware enables migrating virtual machines from other hypervisors to ESXi via the VMware vCenter Converter. OpenShift also offers Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV) operators, which allow the migration of VMs from different hypervisors, including VMware ESXi. Both tools can interact with the source and destination hypervisor platforms and prepare and execute a comprehensive plan for migrating the VM.
Integration with container ecosystems
OpenShift is a mature container orchestration platform that provides a robust environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. It includes an integrated container image registry, offers a developer-friendly environment with features like CI/CD and S2I, and supports serverless and service mesh technologies. OpenShift is deployed in diverse infrastructures.
VMware has also developed solutions to integrate with container ecosystems, mainly through its Tanzu portfolio. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) allows users to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters on VMware infrastructure. Tanzu is deployed in VMware-centric environments.
Virtual Machine Backups
Over the last few years, VMware has transitioned to a model where it relies on its partner ecosystem for data protection solutions. Modern VMware deployments primarily utilize third-party backup solutions that integrate with vSphere through Storage APIs. Many enterprise-grade backup solutions, such as Trilio provide comprehensive, application-centric backup and recovery for OpenShift, including the ability to protect virtual machines running within that environment. This allows for a consistent approach to data protection, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Licensing and cost
Licensing model
VMware has recently started shifting from perpetual to subscription-based licensing for ESXi. VMware offers different editions of ESXi, such as vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus, with varying features and capabilities. For instance, using vMotion requires an Enterprise Plus license. The cost increases with the level of features included in each edition. It is not possible to use the free version of ESXi in enterprise environments owing to its limited feature set.
OpenShift is primarily offered through a subscription model, where organizations pay annually. RedHat offers three different support options for self-managed deployment of OpenShift. It is important to note that OpenShift can be deployed with most features and run without purchasing a subscription from RedHat.
Additional licenses for advanced features
Additional enterprise features provided by VMware, such as VMware vSAN and VMware NSX, require separate licenses, which can increase overall costs. Most OpenShift features, including virtualization, are provided as an add-on to the OpenShift Container Platform.
Learning curve for admins
Owing to its dominance in the virtualization market, administrators with a background in traditional virtualization concepts may find it easier to adapt to VMware’s environment. Mastering features such as vSAN, NSX, and DRS may require additional training and experience.
The learning curve for OpenShift may be steeper. Administrators who are new to containerization and Kubernetes will need to familiarize themselves with Kubernetes concepts and architecture.
Comparison summary
The following table summarizes how the two products compare in all the areas discussed above.
Feature | VMware | OpenShift |
Management | ESXi Includes a web console for the management of individual hosts. vCenter is used for centralized management. | Single web console for all operations. |
Enterprise networking | NSX is offered as a separate product to implement advanced networking features. | Includes support for different network plugins to implement advanced features. |
Storage integration | ESXi communicates directly with physical storage and provides a shared datastore for all VMs. | OpenShift uses CSIs to communicate with storage backends and provides independent PVs for each VM. |
High availability and fault tolerance | ESXi depends on external tools for high availability, such as vCenter, vSphere HA and FT. | OpenShift includes HA features by default but doesn’t have a direct alternative for FT. |
Disaster recovery and business continuity | VMware SRM is offered as a separate product for DR purposes. | OpenShift offers DR features via ACM. |
Integration with container ecosystems | Tanzu is offered as a separate product that allows the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters on VMware infrastructure. | OpenShift is primarily a container orchestration platform and includes containerization capabilities by default. |
Migration compatibility | vCenter Converter | MTV |
Licensing and cost | Expensive: Most functions are offered via separate products. | Less expensive: Most features are included by default. |
Learning curve | Easier because of wide usage. | Steep due to additional knowledge about OpenShift/Kubernetes being required. |
OpenShift virtualization use cases
VMware has undoubtedly maintained a stronghold over the virtualization industry for the past several years. OpenShift virtualization, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer but is quickly transforming into a mature solution. The following are some of the use cases for adopting OpenShift as a virtualization platform:
- Infrastructure modernization: Organizations seeking to upgrade their infrastructure will find OpenShift virtualization appealing, especially those looking to shift from traditional virtualization to a cloud-native model. Using OpenShift enables them to operate virtual machines and containers on a single platform, facilitating the modernization of their application stack.
- Business concerns about VMware’s future: With Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware, certain customers might be apprehensive about the ESXi platform’s long-term commercial stability. Organizations could consider OpenShift virtualization as a sure bet for the future.
- Cost optimization: OpenShift virtualization can be more cost-effective than VMware solutions, with a lower total cost of ownership and fewer additional licensing costs.
- Mix of legacy and modern applications: OpenShift virtualization can be more cost-effective than VMware solutions, with a lower total cost of ownership and fewer additional licensing costs.
- Unified platform: Organizations that need to support both traditional VM-based workloads and containerized applications would benefit from OpenShift virtualization’s ability to manage both on a single platform.
- Developer friendly: OpenShift includes several tools to assist developers in their work. Developers can build, test, and deploy workloads faster, accelerating time to market. The platform supports self-service options and integrates with CI/CD pipelines.
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Conclusion
VMware and OpenShift are strong virtualization solutions that cater to various organizational needs and technology environments. VMware is particularly effective in traditional virtualization settings, offering a comprehensive and mature platform that integrates well with current infrastructures, making it an excellent choice for enterprises with substantial investments in virtual machines. Conversely, OpenShift is recognized as a robust container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes, designed for organizations aiming to modernize their infrastructures using DevOps methodologies. Ultimately, the decision between VMware and OpenShift should depend on an organization’s specific needs, existing skills, and long-term strategic objectives.
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