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."
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.
Re:VMware for free (Score:5, Interesting)
No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Re:They can't even beat a book seller (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:3, Interesting)
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 instead of finding somebody who knows Linux and "sort of" knows your distro and "Sort of" knows your VM solution and giving them a few months to "ramp up" and "figure it out."
"Free" is great, but you're the only guy in town who understands you can't be replaced--You instantly become the "key man" and are thus an instant liability to the company.