PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack 286
Julie188 writes "This should make VMware nervous. PayPal and eBay are yanking VMware software from some 80,000 servers and replacing it with OpenStack. Initially, PayPal is replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer."
Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Informative)
VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Informative)
Nice for public facing websites and custom software but for a lot of enterprise apps they are certified only on VMware or hyper-v. You lose support on any other hyper visor
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Interesting)
For now. But I've found hyper-v is at best an adequate product and VMware is obscenely priced, so in the end enterprise software houses will adapt as they did to a landscape that shifted away from closed source *nix solutions like SCO and Solaris. Sure, they may only support Redhat as far as distros go, but the fact is that VMware and Microsoft's shoddy little product hardly rate as the only virtualization solutions out there.
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Enterprise customers have been using a wide variety of linux virtualization solutions for many years now. Virtuozzo, kvm-based systems, xen based systems and many others are the norm. It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.
They're the new version of "let's store everything on netapps".
FD: my company makes both these nonsense choices, but most of our customers don't anymore.
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It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.
Or perhaps they have different needs than you. Perhaps they have a budget for 1-2 personnel to manage their virtual machine environment, not 5-10. Perhaps they have a budget to spend about $70k for salary rather than the $120k linux virtualization guys go for. Or the extra few hundred grand for the five-times-as-many people required to carry it off.
Or perhaps they want to be able to easily replace those 1-2 people when they quit, retire, or die of old age with somebody else who already knows the product ins
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You clearly didn't read my post, nor understand the issue.
We didn't choose to do the smart thing, so our needs are irrelevant.
I'm in regular contact with a larger percentage of large enterprise IT shops, probably over 20% of the total base of sizable IT departments, and I speak from the experience of what *they* choose.
Meanwhile, if you need to deal with virtualization management at large scale, vmware is worse in terms of staff efficiency, because you can't do custom automation in a reasonable way.
Your nu
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Informative)
HyperV isnt really an option for a lot of things, since its support for non-SUSE, non-Windows stuff is, shall we say, "lacking". Certainly you'll have a lot of fun getting pfSense running on it.
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FreeBSD (on which pfSense is based) has Hyper-V support since last year, but as pfSense and other firewalls are slower in their updates the current releases are still using FreeBSD 8.1. the beta snapshots of pfSense 2.1 use 8.3 which can include Hyper-V integration.
Currently it installs fine using the legacy network adaptors (so you only get 100MBit links).
If you want full OS intergration and to use non-legacy network adaptors then you need to use the latest 2.1 beta & install a rebuilt FreeBSD kernel w
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Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Informative)
Well, up until the point you realize that there's a bug in the hypervisor which affects networking which affects the thing you're trying to virtualize.
In THEORY, the hypervisor you use doesnt matter. In practice, it absolutely does. For instance, pfSense (a firewall based on FreeBSD) has no integration tools from HyperV, and I dont believe has any virtualization drivers for VMXNet3 on ESXi. So HyperV will have no integration in being able to safely shut the VM down, and ESXi's performance with the networking will be less than optimal.
There can be other issues; the virtual hardware presented by one hypervisor or another may cause problems with certain OSes. Theres also big differences in performance; one chart I saw indicated 2-3x better performance on large numbers of HTTP requests to apache-on-ESXi compared to apache-on-HyperV.
Incidentally, the 3 top hypervisors (Xen, vSphere, HyperV) all fit that definition of enterprise that you linked.
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Does pfsense support automatic shutting down from UPS/low battery alerts?
yep [wordpress.com]
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Because it allows you to do inter-VLAN routing right on the virtual infrastructure, with several big benefits.
1) your infrastructure no longer needs to have separate warm-standby appliances / routers to keep everything up during an outage; your firewall now gets in-built protection from HA / DRS
2) you can now centrally monitor and control inter-vlan traffic that comes from and goes to the virtual infrastructure, without sending that traffic out to a router and waiting for it to come back. If your firewall s
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I virtualized a Windows system a few years ago via Parallels Workstation. Application A ran on the host machine under server 2008. Application B ran on the virtualized machine under server 2008 as well. Application A talked to B and vice versa. *Every* problem with either application was immediately blamed on the virtualization. And a good portion of any other network problem in general was blamed on that one virtualized system. There was one afternoon where the satellite we were using decided to lose
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sort of true
you can have memory and other similar bugs come up when you are running an untested and unsupported app/os/hyper visor combo
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Insightful)
VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.
Vmware is arguably facing a serious structural squeeze: Outside of a few neat-but-not-necessarily-all-that-widely-used features, virtualization technology is being commodified pretty aggressively. Vmware is still arguably the easiest to use; but that doesn't help them much with customers who are running enough servers that having a few gurus in house is cheaper than paying the license fees. Even worse, at the same time that team FOSS is chipping away at the large-scale market, Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.
If it were just a squeeze from one direction or the other, I'd be less pessimistic; but forces are converging on them from both sides. Unless Vmware discounts their licenses to nearly free, their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, and having strong enterprise support and brand recognition isn't exactly going to save them from Microsoft(who has the same thing) on the low-volume smaller shop end. Blood Bath.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been a long time coming, but before going all crazy on knocking VMWare... we wouldn't have VMs without them? VMs that revolutionized IT infrastructure.
I don't think they've even begun to react to the competition or perceive it, maybe this move by paypal will put Xen on their radar, but for the longest time they were THE ONLY virtualization provider because nobody else could do it, people who call VMWare a monopoly simply do not understand the nature of technology and innovation.
Ex. name one anti-competitive practice they've employed? I can name one that's not ESXi has always been free, and that is actually what openstack is starting to surpass ESXi making it a viable alternative to the ESXi full blown vizor.
You folks are right though, the licensing structure completely bends the little guys over, a simple solution (w vCenter) can easily run up in the 50k range for like 200-300 users, unacceptable. But... all they have to do is bring their licensing costs down... right?
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I have nothing against them as a company, or as innovators(for reasons I'd rather not revisit, I once enjoyed the better part of a day grovelling through their documentation on simulating various PC timers, while ensuring certain sorts of consistency under varying CPU loads and across host migrations, a surprisingly hairy business).
I just strongly suspect that they are pretty much screwed.
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Theyre screwed becuase they have the best product? They can change their pricing to be competitive if they really want; apparently they just dont see the need yet.
They wont be "screwed" until their competitors have better features than them, but if you check their competitor's marketing pages, you will notice that none of them claim to be better-- just that theyre a better "value". If / when VMware has to start claiming that, then theyre in trouble.
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That's going to be a problem for them as well. Because their customers who have been paying the current price will be annoyed if the price drops just so VMWare can maintain marketshare.
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Actually I never unstood why you have VMs on a system that you don't have to emulate. Ie, I use VMware on a Mac to run Windows stuff, but I can't figure out why run Windows on top of Windows? Sure there's the issue of making a sandbox, but surely there's more to it than that, it's an expensive and slow way to get something simple done. Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same
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Service isolation is a nice one.
hardware and infrastructure abstraction and guest portability
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Actually I never unstood why you have VMs on a system that you don't have to emulate. Ie, I use VMware on a Mac to run Windows stuff, but I can't figure out why run Windows on top of Windows? Sure there's the issue of making a sandbox, but surely there's more to it than that, it's an expensive and slow way to get something simple done. Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same server do both jobs directly.
Because they don't run twice as slow. One of the MAJOR Sun servers in a shop I used to work in normally ran at 14% CPU capacity. Add a few more virtual servers to the box and you can get a lot more for your hardware buck. And, incidentally, save electricity - they were blowing breakers because of all those mostly-idle boxes each pulling power.
With a suitable high-performance host, which can be hardware-optimized or simply running para-virtualized, the actual VM overhead is quite low. In the mean time, you'r
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:4, Informative)
You're running an emulating application on an OS. We're talking about running a bare-metal hypervisor on hardware. There's a huge, huge difference.
Common wisdom is that ESX will eat around 5 - 10% of the system's total performance doing all its work to keep all those various VMs up and running. When you look at the cost savings and increases in reliability, you can't beat it.
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You have any number of options for disk. First of all, pick your disk technology. Need lots of space and very little actual performance? Go with SATA. Need a little more performance? SAS. Even more? SSDs. Still not enough? RAMSAN has products that'll knock your socks off and give you better performance at the disk than anything you've ever set up on a physical server before. You can even mix and match these technologies. Vendors like NetApp will let you attach disk shelves to filer heads of all different ty
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I'm in engineering and software, but not IT. Seems to me like you used to have 40 underused servers.
Bingo. This is the major driving force behind the move to virtualization: underutilized hardware. But systems don't scale up and down perfectly, so I can't pay $30 for enterprise grade servers with the processing power of a Pentium II and 10GB of RAM and disks that do 20 IOPS because I'm only ever writing some log files. I have to spend $3,000 for a server that's going to have much of its hardware sitting idle most of the time.
Maybe they all did indepedent jobs, one service per machine. Why not combine all servers into one machine, but not virtualized?
Because having one broken service bring down 40 others is bad and I don't want to
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Insightful)
No knocks from me on VMWare itself. It's biggest failing has always been it's licensing.
I think you may be over-valuing them though. We had VMs on mainframes in the '70s (VM/370). VMWare brought full virtualization to PC class hardware (as opposed to the lesser capabilities of DOSBox and company). In part, it was simply a matter of waiting until x86 hardware was sufficiently capable. I have little doubt that we would have VMs today with or without them.
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You folks are right though, the licensing structure completely bends the little guys over, a simple solution (w vCenter) can easily run up in the 50k range for like 200-300 users, unacceptable. But... all they have to do is bring their licensing costs down... right?
They have a solution for the little guys.. Essentials+; 3 or fewer hosts.
50k buys the highest level of licensing they offer, for several hosts. Now if you are buying extreme-high capacity hosts which you should be using for virtualization
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Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.
Better yet, that's also "Buy Windows Server Datacenter Edition, get Hyper-V for free, as well as free licensing for as many Windows Server guest OS instances that as you want to run." That is a huge money-saver for Microsoft shops even over the Free alternatives.
Re:VMware for free (Score:5, Interesting)
No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.
Re:VMware for free (Score:4, Insightful)
....and of which none of the competitors do as good of a job as VMware. I guess you get what you pay for.
Now to play the next counter argument, one of the org's I support is small, with an appropriately sized IT budget (small)
They are very well served by Hyper-V, and the low cost is a major factor.
So use the right tool for the job. Free with slightly less features VS. pay for more or better features.
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Perhaps not as good as TODAY, but VMs and their management is a rapidly expanding area for Free Software.
Meanwhile, would you choose VMWare's free but no management or FOSS's free and some management? If the latter, VMWare is still in trouble. Essentially, they went from having a near exclusive on the whole thing to an ever narrowing space between free management tools and their incredibly pricy ones.
If they want to hold on to any of the low end, they're going to have to add more management capability. If t
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The issue that comes into play is that VMware offers a very small feature set ( with ease of use ) for a huge sum. It is getting harder every day to justify the cost for those features.
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by "competitors offer for free", you mean "XenServer offers for free", right? Im pretty sure you still have to pay for HyperV (or a minimum of 1 Windows server license) plus CALs, one way or the other.
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Re:VMware for free (Score:5, Informative)
No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.
Live migration is not free, but it is cheap -- less than $1000 bucks per server for a standard license. Central management of Hyper-V requires systemcenter virtual machine manager which is not free.
At sufficient scale, the VMware licensing costs are almost non-consequential. For purchasing VMware to be the better choice, it is not necessary that the license have a lower cost. The ROI needs to be higher. As long as VMware can offer a higher ROI, through functionality, and advanced features, or through greater consolidation ratios (lower cost per virtualized application in a cloud; more workloads per server, less electricity or hardware cost per workload on average), then the organizations who can justify the use of those features will save more money by buying VMware's products and have lower costs than if they used a competitor's product with a lower per-unit license charge.
Competitors' products don't offer free comparable enterprise-quality equivalents to Transparent page sharing (TPS)/Transparent memory compression (memory overcommit), the Cisco Nexus1000V distributed virtual switch, CPU Memory HotPlugging, Virtual Serial Port concentrator, Host Profiles, Resource Pools/Distributed Resource Management, Distributed Power Management, Storage I/O Control, Vmware APIs for Array Integration, vShield Endpoint, vShield App, vShield Edge, vCloud Network and Security (VXLAN), etc.
The competitors' total available functionality is more limited.
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http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/compare-kits.html [vmware.com]
The free version gives Vmware workstation a run for its money(if you are OK with running your day-to-day OS on top of it, rather than it on top of your OS, or you have a second machine); but it is the toy seats by the standards of what they aren't exactly giving away.
Re:VMware for free (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out that license again.... last I looked it was non-commercial use. Not only that, but its limited, no VSphere or any of that.
So this wouldn't really fly for...any of the use cases we are discussing. They may be best in breed for many features, but there is vanishingly little that they are the only game in town for.
Not only that, but as a "free" offering, they could stop offering it and stop updating it at any time, leaving anyone using it on the same buggy insecure version forever.
While its true an open source project may die, at least it dies, leaving you with options....and lets face it...nothing as high profile and highly used as the free hypervisors is just going to die off anytime soon.
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Check out that license again.... last I looked it was non-commercial use. Not only that, but its limited, no VSphere or any of that.
If you can find that clause, id be interested; however the EULA they link makes no mention whatsoever of a specific edition, and they set no restrictions that I can see other than the ones imposed by the installed license.
And you do get to use "vSphere" the client, you DONT get to use vCenter. So no clustering, no automatic updates, no VSA or VCVA, no hardware acceleration on SAN, etc.
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You might want to point out to us where you saw "for non-commercial use" because I don't see that anywhere. I was always under the impression ESXi was a crippled first-ones-free method of getting companies to use VMWare and then upsell them when they realize there isn't central management, live motion, or support for more than 32GB of RAM/VM
Re:VMware for free (Score:4, Informative)
They don't restrict you from using vHpervisor in a commercial capacity. However, you are not allowed rent out virtual machines, or host virtual machines commercially for third parties on a free ESXi (Nor are you allowed to do so with commercially purchased vSphere licenses; you can only legally sell or rent the usage of VMs on VMware software through their service provider program, where you are required to install a usage monitor, and you pay by powered on reserved virtual RAM per Gigabyte-Hour on a monthly basis.).
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Oh, you want it free?
OK, here you go: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html [vmware.com]
All that ranting, and all you needed to do was ask.
That's the hypervisor only, not any of the features that make VMware attractive to the Enterprise. That's kind of like someone complaining that Cisco hardware is expensive, and you offer a free supervisor engine that won't really do anything until you surround it with a $40,000 switch chassis.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Interesting)
This story from Gigaom is a little more tempered than the article on Businessinsider. It quotes the Paypal director, saying they will continue to use VMware - if you read right through to the end of it.
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/25/mirantis-open-sources-its-openstack-cloud-management-tools/ [gigaom.com]
This, in any case, is not a "tipping-point" indicator.
With or without Mirantis or Fuel, Openstack is a tool kit for building your own CloudOS. Unless you can make a business based on the internal IP generated, there's no win here for most enterprise shops.
Amazon did this sucessfully - getting value from reselling access to raw infrastructure, based on development created for internal needs.
Yahoo failed at this, after more than a decade optimising their own OS layer for internet scale-out. They would have been better served to eliminate their OS engineering unit, buying common OTS Linux/Windows.
PayPal are somewhere between these poles. Having been on their own linux-based, scale-out physical architecture for more than a decade, they are well-positioned to derive value from Openstack. If you were Williams-Sonoma or Chevron? They do not want or need to become an OS developer/integrator.
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Even if the solution is inferior, I've always favored investing in solutions that don't require lock in. If VMware fails, it is their own fault for not providing their users freedom.
PayPal Uses OpenStack (Score:5, Informative)
Good Riddens (Score:5, Insightful)
Theres something wrong with VMware that makes it think it can charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing. They need their asses handed to them for a few years to put them back in their place.
Re: Good Riddens (Score:2)
Even for nonprofits VMWare is excessively expensive. Most vendors are half price or so (some are even 75%), but not VMWare. If I remember right they were 95% of the original price.
They're insane.
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Re: Good Riddens (Score:4, Interesting)
The last CEO made structural changes to enhance profitability yet sacrificed the long term health of the company. For 5 years of "work" cashed in $60 million in stock grants in 3 days (Nov 2012) and was getting a $1.5M USD salary with cash bonuses.
The failed "new" licensing scheme that they tried to push thru in 2011 backfired because it was seen for what it really was, a cash grab.
The company has become extremely bureaucratic and has lost it's innovative edge. In essence it had become Microsoft. I guess that is what you get when you hire alot of management staff & executives from Microsoft.
They are responsible for their own shortcomings and present/future predicaments.
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..which generally gets others to realize that theres plenty of money to be had if only they get their act together. Amazing how many features and how much bugfixing HyperV got once MS realized that a decent hypervisor was a compelling feature.
Seems to me things are working as intended; this is how we ended up with multiple sweet browsers when MS stagnated.
Re: Even for nonprofits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Even for nonprofits (Score:5, Informative)
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It's name. VMWare was the first to virtualize the x86, and thus people bought into them by name alone. Sort of like how people used to buy IBM, or Microsoft. Now they buy VMWare.
And I know many a sysadmin who for their home system, refuse to run anything but the home versions of VMWare (no
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In fairness, at least on Mac, VMWare slaughters VirtualBox and Parallels on performance. Worth the money, IMHO. On Linux/Windows it could well be a different story.
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Open Source, Upstreamed, Accelerated OpenGL Linux Display Driver (vmwgfx) = Linux win for VMware.
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I have no experience with Parallels, but you cannot compare Virtualbox with any of the other hypervisors. It is great for one-off projects, until it randomly devours your VM due to an upgrade (which happened to me, and was a documented bug); or until it hangs; or until you realize that its acceleration for one or another feature is limited to windows only.
VMWare workstation really is miles ahead of VirtualBox, and really is worth the price. I wish I could try HyperV on my home rig, but of course installin
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charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing
That isn't why organizations virtualize.
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I have ~950 VMs on 14 servers.
Even at full price, I'm paying WAAAAY less in licensing than if I had to have all that hardware running, moreso when you throw on renting more space, paying for more power/AC/network/etc.
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Even at full price, I'm paying WAAAAY less in licensing than if I had to have all that hardware running, moreso when you throw on renting more space, paying for more power/AC/network/etc.
But without virtualization, would you really be running all those servers -- or would you have fewer servers with more apps consolidated on each one? I bet the latter.
So while virtualization saves money, it's not necessarily as much as it might appear at first glance. Virtualization encourages the operation of more ser
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Happy to post a screen shot if you'd like.
About 100 VMs on a Dell R720 full of memory & fast hard drives is reasonable.
Yes, I don't have failover capacity among many other things, but mgmt isn't willing to pay for it.
Re:Good Riddens (Score:4, Insightful)
*cough*bullshit*cough*
*cough*bullshit*cough*
What are you calling bullshit on? The value?
vSphere 5 Enterprise with Ops Manager is $4300/CPU. He has 14 servers, if each is dual-processor, then he'd pay $60K pruchase price plus $14K/year maintenance. Assuming that servers + storage cost him $15K + $500/year per server for hardware support, then his total initial cost is $270K + $21K/year for maintenance, or $284/initial + $22/year maintenance for each virtual server. How are you going to beat $280/server with physical servers? The datacenter network switch ports alone for a physical server may cost you more than $280.
Or are you claiming that 14 physical servers can't support 950 virtual servers? 67:1 is a fairly high consolidation ratio, but not unreasonable if they are typical lightly used office servers - 384GB of RAM and 16 cores of CPU in each physical server could easily support that load.
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Generally most people arent going to need more than Essentials Plus, (for 3 hosts i think?) unless they really need DRS or DPM or the other fancy stuff. For more than 3 hosts, theyre going to want standard edition; you can get a kit of 6 CPUs for $11k. The cost of the backend SAN alone is generally going to exceed that, and I imagine that 3 2-socket, 8-12 core servers is going to run in the area of ~$25-40k.
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Theres nothing wrong with them realizing that huge numbers of IT shops are willing to pay that money.
You're right that it is refreshing to see some seriously healthy competition from Xen and HyperV, tho-- their prices are seriously painful.
Re:Good Riddens (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when HyperV, Xenserver, Xen and KVM all do that for free.
Re:Good Riddens (Score:4, Informative)
HyperV has been pretty buggy every time Ive used it (though I have not tried 3.0). Hot-adding USB, NICs, etc has been painful, when it even works without a reboot; there have been several times I've seen virtual NICs unresponsive until removed and re-added with 2 reboot cycles. Ive also seen scenarios where SCVMM was completely unresponsive because of some asinine dependency.
Xen I have little experience with, because it has apparently no ability to be nested in VMWare workstation. Unfortunate, since HyperV and ESXi are all quite happy to nest, with ESXi happy to nest 3-4 layers deep. I would still probably choose Xen over HyperV, because of HyperV's historically awful support of non-Windows stuff, and non-existant freeBSD support.
I admit Im a VMWare fanboy, because they seem to have the broadest OS support, the best performance, and the most sane tools. MS's virtual network editor was seriously bad last time i used it, nearly as bad as VMWare Workstation's. And to this day I cant think of a feature that the other two have that ESXi has, while I can definately think of features ESXi has that the other two dont (though probably not at the free level; the cool bits always seem to end up at Enterprise+).
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And KVM just works and has for a very long time.
Re:Good Riddens (Score:5, Informative)
KVM is not so much a Type-1 Hypervisor, as it is a "jail" for the Linux kernel.
It does have a great utility, especially for hosting isolations and for just-in-time host creation.
But is is just NOT a real, NuMA aware, scheduling sensitive Hypervisor with a cluster awareness for capacity management, etc.
KVM is a type-1 hypervisor. I can't believe somebody with 3 digit UID is posting this misinformed crap.
Re:Good Riddens (Score:5, Informative)
KVM provides full virtualization with hardware acceleration, and the line between Type 1 and Type 2 is significantly blurred by virtue of the fact that the loadable kernel module for it does indeed operate as a bare metal hypervisor. You aren't limited to Linux guests, either. I've got a combination of Linux, BSD, Windows, and Solaris guests running in a cluster right now. These guests run unmodified, and performance is admirable. In fact, it's better than I've achieved on similar hardware with VMware, and I actually have better control of the entire network stack from a host perspective via ebtables and arptables. Fine grained resource management is available via cgroups [libvirt.org] facilities.
Do you actually operate anything in a KVM environment?
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im currently running a heavy production load on 6.0.something, and not quite up to the latest hot fix. No blue screens in a while. the only issue is the depth of changes in the hot fixes dont allow a smooth upgrade path, and the lack of polish you mention does get in the way. I wouldnt call it anywhere close to perfect, and dont now if I would choose it if this wasnt already a huge installation, but the price is definitely right.
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Can you name one thing VMWare does that HyperV with Server 2012 cannot do?
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Can you name one thing VMWare does that HyperV with Server 2012 cannot do?
Access shared storage? (Do a live migration without moving or copying the underlying virtual disk images.)
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You may want to go and read about what each platform can do, because this is no longer accurate in many ways.
See here for more info: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=13483 [aidanfinn.com]
Re:Good Riddens (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't do half the things with a unix server that you can do with a mainframe...
You can't do half the things with windows that you can do with a risc unix server...
You can't do half the things with an arm based tablet that you can do with a full size x86 laptop...
When the cheaper product does *enough* and is marketed well, the expensive product gets pushed into a niche, and as the locked in customer base dwindles very few new customers sign up.
It's no biggie. You have to understand the big pic (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi
Speaking as someone who spends 100% of their working week in VMware it's no biggie. A (very) small group of us look after a stack just as big as that.
With MS entreprise agreements that mean you now have to a seperate for each socket in the cluster (ie when DRS moves the guest to another cluster node or you get a host failure and HA kicks in) it costs an awful lot and also makes Hyper V looks more enticing to the bean counters as the Enterprise comes with all the Hyper V management tools..
VMware realise they cannot compete on cost and they have said as much. No matter what you say about Hyper V I have seen some nasty failures that just wouldn't happen in VMware (and lets not forget host failures can mean loosing 30 guests at one time (Lets not go into allowable failure scenarios..)
I have seen a Hyper V guest mentally shit itself and cause the host to fail in such a manner that the failed machines didn't restart. So rather than have a restart on another cluster member a guest was able to take out a host. Just wouldn't happen with VMware and it's highly advanced Virtual Machine Manager. VMware also has awesome other features including shared memory paging etc etc.
Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.
Just my 2 cents.
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I have seen vmware virtual center swear a machine was running that was not. I got to migrate everything onto another machine in the cluster and reboot that host. This was what support had me do as we got so far down the road and I really needed that VM back up.
Nothing is perfect. The issue is the costs are not a few hundred per host, that would be acceptable. VMware will need to reduce its cost or it will lose market share.
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Yep, I know its a few thou per socket depending on edition and such. I was on about a few hundred per VMs, but yep, I know what you mean :)
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If platform and information security are requirements, there's no alternative to VMware at scale.
I'd like to see PCI/HIPAA Openstack. ;-)
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They are running a single application - or at least a series of related applications against the same data set.
That's no problem. There's no mixed-trust issue, and everything in PayPal is assumed to be under PCI DSS, down to service reps desktops.
This is an unusual case - not close to typical.
Show me your mixed-trust cloud, with multiple applications and use cases with arbitrary connectivity requirements - like most data centers.
Now, where can you insert, manage and report on controls for security and comp
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Regions are not enforced at NIC. It is similar to tenant isolation at the port-group in VMware.
Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big (Score:4, Interesting)
Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.
Just my 2 cents.
As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"
"Well, first you buy Windows..."
Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...
Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.
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Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.
Just my 2 cents.
As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"
"Well, first you buy Windows..."
Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...
Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.
FUD much? Windows Hyper-V Server [wikipedia.org] is free, as in the dollar cost to you is zero. If you want to run Windows on top of it then obviously you have to pay for that, but we're not arguing about that. You could just as easily run Linux on top of it and never pay a cent to Microsoft (although there is no good reason to do so - you'd use Xen instead).
The guy you were talking to was obviously clueless in thinking you have to buy Windows first, but he was right about Hyper-V itself being free.
Give me Hyper-V over
Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big (Score:4, Insightful)
Read again. Hyper-V Server is 100% free - you do not have to buy Windows to get it, you download the ISO from the Microsoft site, and install it. It's fully functional (HA,live migration, live storage migration etc etc). If you wanted to run a whole bunch of Linux VM's on it then you could do that without paying microsoft a cent.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
They can't even beat a book seller (Score:5, Funny)
VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books
VMWare is completely lost if that is how they view their marketplace.
Re:They can't even beat a book seller (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when an MBA type person runs a tech company. He thinks more about brand and reputation than being the best in the market. He thinks marketing and commercials can replace good products that offer great value.
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I think that isn't right. Carl headed up sales at VMware for almost a decade. I think he just doesn't (or at least didn't) understand that Amazon isn't a bookseller. It's a tech giant with business and technical capabilities that are outside of VMware's core competencies and are going to be hard to match especially when they're laying off architect level infrastructure folks right and left.
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VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books
Amazon is as much about selling books as Pepsi is about selling sugared water [wikipedia.org].
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Maybe that silly statement (which was made in context of their new cloud hosting plans) was intended to deflect attention away from what they are really frightened of.
eg AWS isn't really much of a threat for VMWares existing enterprise customers, but OpenStack and MS Azure could end up being one due to hybrid public/private cloud stuff gaining some traction.
I reckon there is a chance they are more nervous about Azure (MS) and OpenStack (De
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I don't think that quote is literal. It's CEO trash talking at a conference. He obviously knows Amazon is a competitor and not just a book seller.
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You work at a software shop where you sell custom software "solutions"!
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Don't respond to obvious trolls.
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Open source winning again....
Consider PayPal, they may just be tired of sharing their vast revenue. Someone at the top wants to buy an island or new yacht and all those VMware fees would come in handy.
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... and all those VMware fees would come in handy.
And there is nothing wrong with that in my books. If anything, it's a great thing. Some big-wig wants to buy an island, migrates [some of] the company to open source and in doing so shows many smaller businesses that it is possible, it works and they feel more confident the next time some geek makes a suggestion like that in a meeting.
I am personally very tired of pushback from management based purely on the fact that they don't understand technology and have been trained to think that the best product mus
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"shows many smaller businesses that it is possible" assuming you have a dedicated department of people to make it happen.
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OpenStack manages an Hypervisor, VMWare are many things an Hypervisor and a lot of administration applications (than only manage VMWare Hypervisor), OpenStack can manage multiple hypervisors [openstack.org]. I want to know what they will use? KVM or Xen?
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The only supported way to get the data is a hunk of bloatware that only run on Windows
No, you can use the Web client, Powershell CLI, the Perl SDK, the SOAP API, the RCLI, or the ESXI shell/ssh or the ESXi CLI/shell.
I think VMware might have more management options possibly than any of the competitors. And there is documentation readily available for the interfaces.
The cloning mandates randomization of your MAC address, even if you want to *keep* it for the clone
You can change the MAC address