Congratulations to all our friends over at VMware on the recent announcement of the long-awaited vSphere 7 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4 which include the embedded Kubernetes services (aka Project Pacific).
This version of vSphere has been rearchitected to use Kubernetes, so it now supports modern containerized workloads in addition to the traditional Virtual Machine (VM) workloads. Exciting indeed, but to get this you have to jump into VMware Cloud Foundation 4. Otherwise, no “vSphere with K8s for you!”.
As VMware describes in their announcement blog, these are Essential Services for Hybrid Cloud. We couldn’t agree more, and as a Best of VMworld winner for Agile Automation with hundreds of thousands of workloads under management, these are core services that Morpheus leverages every day.
REASON 1: Any application stack on any cloud
Containerization with Kubernetes as the underlying orchestrator has quickly become the new standard for application modernization. Most organizations have started developing, or are in the process of deploying containerized applications. Having said that, VMs will be around for a very long time and some organizations still have bare-metal applications. On the flip side, we see more and more cloud-native PaaS services and even FaaS as part of the app-dev mix.
This is why organizations need a multi-cloud provisioning, automation & orchestration platform that will work with any application architecture regardless of cloud. Check out the long list of Morpheus supported cloud environments here!
REASON 2: Container-native since Day 1
The Morpheus multi-cloud management platform has been supporting containers since inception, including our own built-in CNCF certified Kubernetes service. In our latest release, we’ve also included brownfield onboarding of Kubernetes in our cluster service.
This is very exciting for anyone thinking about vSphere 7 or already using Red Hat OpenShift, EKS, AKS or other native Kubernetes stacks alongside VMware. Check out the list of supported Kubernetes environments here!
REASON 3: Morpheus has more functionality than vRA 8.0
vRA 8 was a complete re-write of vRealize Automation based on vRA Cloud. VMware markets vRA 8 as having a new modern architecture, but when you dig in it this re-write also means it’s essentially a 1.0 product lacking many of the core capabilities that vRA 7.x had.
We’re not the only ones who’ve noticed the gaps. From customers to bloggers, people are scratching their heads. Missing features include a lack of approval policy, no multi-tenancy, an astonishingly limited set of RBAC policies, no Terraform support, no custom day-2 actions, and more.
Morpheus is arguably one of the most completely functional multi-cloud management platforms on the market. It’s why Morpheus had the highest scores in the 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities report on Cloud Management Platforms for multi-cloud use cases including cloud provisioning, cloud brokering, and cloud governance.
REASON 4: Easier to deploy Morpheus than move to vRA 8.0
Presently, there’s no migration or upgrade path to vRA 8 ‘ yup, complete rip and replace although they do have a ‘migration assistant’ that will let you know just how much pain you are in for. And while vRA 8 has simplified the installation of the software itself, you still have to purchase and configure almost all of the plug-ins for your existing infrastructure. The native integrations for VMware vRealize 8 can also be counted on your fingers.
Check out the long list of native integrations with Morpheus when considering moving to vRA 8. As many of our customers have already experienced, Morpheus can have a fully functional installation in less than an hour or two and that includes being installed, connected to third-party technologies, and actively provisioning into private and public clouds. Just check out this case study on time to value with Morpheus.
REASON 5: Avoid the VMware tax and lower your costs
It does seem there’s another small change to VCF v4, the STARTER edition appears to include some basic automation. No details yet, but one thing I do know is that VCF Advanced includes vRealize Automation (vRA) Advanced which is solely focused on VMware vSphere private cloud.
It’s not until one invests over $22,000 per CPU in VCF Enterprise that you get vRA Enterprise and ‘multi-cloud’ automation.
Morpheus supports over 20+ platforms including vSphere 7 and as an application-centric orchestrator, we license only on the number of application workloads under management. We’re typically half the cost of VMware with vRA so if you stick with VCF Standard and then add Morpheus you’ll get much more capability at a much lower cost envelope. Don’t get arm-twisted into shelf-ware as part of your VMware ELA.
Oh ya, and Gartner thinks we’re a Leader! Check out this blog on Morpheus Data being named a leader in the Gartner MQ for CMP for 2 years running! You may notice that VMware is in one of the non-leader quadrants if you download the full report.
If you’d like more detail on our approach to multi-cloud management check out this Morpheus white paper. Would you like a live demo? Go ahead and request one here.
