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."
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: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:Good Riddens (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when HyperV, Xenserver, Xen and KVM all do that for free.
Re: Even for nonprofits (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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]