VMware, a Falling Giant?

New submitter Lashat writes "According to Ars Technica, 'A new survey seems to show that VMware's iron grip on the enterprise virtualization market is loosening, with 38 percent of businesses planning to switch vendors within the next year due to licensing models and the robustness of competing hypervisors.' What do IT-savvy Slashdotters have to say about moving away from one of the more stable and feature rich VM architectures available?"

Comments

Re:Microsoft Virtual PC

[motd2k]

Chalk / Cheese? Virtual PC is positioned no where near VMWare - try HyperVM/Xen/KVM

I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

We use OpenNebula/KVM here.
Both are free as in speech, I can do live migration, it's easy to manage, etc.
I'm running the whole thing on an NFS share from an AoE storage backend.
100% libre software solution, and it kicks ass.

Good luck vmware.

Re:I ca see why

[IMightB]

Damn, you're lazy, try http://http//opennebula.org/support:contracted took me all of 30 seconds to find. Your argument is old and tired, most serious OSS solutions have options for commercial support.

Re:I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

I'd imagine they could call anyone on our team, including myself. We know the code intimately at this point, and have put it through extensive testing.
This is more of a problem in the proprietary wold - there is a certain point that when something doesn't work you are forced to call for support because the logs only say so much. If you can trace the software and have access to the source, you honestly don't need to call anyone. At that point, it's just a matter of your own determination and the skill set of your team.

As an aside, we did not have to address P2V migration, because this was part of a new product offering. We are considering replacing our internal infrastructure with this, but that's probably going to happen gradually over time. We have very few windows servers left, and I'm frankly considering phasing them out so we don't have to go through the hassle of activation and the big problem Windows has with changing hardware.

Re:Nope

[Karl Cocknozzle]

The problem is that they VMWare is too expensive.

"Expensive" is relative to your needs. If you only need to host VMs on one or two hosts, don't need live guest migration, storage migration, high-availability, or the ability to manage a farm of VM hosts, then VMware's licensing will cost you exactly nothing.

Where you get into non-trivial costs is when you need guest-migration, HA, or some of their (quite awesome, by the way) power-saving features (i.e. DRS) because at that point you end up needing shared-storage and a license for vCenter and a license for vSphere (varies based on your needs.)

Dynamics on this are changing, though... Except for the recent price spike, the cost of storage has been on downward trend for some time. And the availability of tools like FreeNAS and OpenFiler mean even a small company can afford to stand up a relatively robust shared-storage platform for not a lot more than the cost of the hardware and the time required to set it up. If you married this, (or even a simple EqualLogics device, which are also darn competitive anymore) to VMware vSphere for Small Business, you're into a solution where you've spent under $1,000 to license everything you need from VMware, $0 to license the storage product, and your only other costs are hardware and licensing for Guest OS, which would also be $0 if you're running all Open Source.

Of course, there are exceptions... There are plenty of $100 million companies that are 24x7 operations and need a tighter RTO than VMware Small Biz can provide. For them a simple SAN unit without two, three or four-way mirroring is an unacceptable risk. But I've worked with companies at the $100 million level where they're so buried in server bloat and ad hoc purchasing that the thought of a VMware environment that lets the shut-off 80% of their hardware sounds fantastic.