Worrying about Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many users are seeking potential alternatives to VMware’s server virtualization platform and other related products. While some alternatives provide similar functionalities to VMware, they may differ in implementations and performance.
With SmartX HCI, users can not only achieve a full-stack replacement of VMware infrastructure including virtualization, storage, management, and network security, but also benefit from enhanced features and higher performance.
Here we provide three articles that compare VMware and SmartX HCI in snapshot, caching, I/O path, and their performances under these scenarios.
VMware vs SmartX: Snapshot Mechanism and I/O Performance Comparison
Different from VMware vSphere snapshot which relies on redo-log files and disk chains, SMTX OS (SmartX HCI software) snapshot uses independent metadata to avoid snapshot traversal. It also uses a larger extent to contain data. These features effectively reduce latency and enable a rapid restoration of I/O performance after taking a snapshot.
VMware vs SmartX: Distributed Storage Caching Mechanism and Performance Comparison
Under the same data capacity and I/O read/write scenarios, ZBS’s (SmartX distributed block storage software) unified caching mechanism effectively improves cache space utilization and prevents cache breakdown. Even under an outbreak of data access requests, there is no drop in VM performance.
VMware vs SmartX: I/O Path Comparison and Performance Impact
Under the normal state and data recovery scenario, ZBS has a higher probability of local I/O and a theoretically lower latency than vSAN. vSAN, though, performs remote I/O frequently at normal state, it provides better I/O paths for VM migration.
You can find more information on VMware and SmartX HCI’s scalability and how SmartX HCI’s unique features contribute to its critical capabilities from our previous blogs.
