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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?"
Microsoft started offering their own Virtual PC software for free, but it's shit compared to features of VMware products. Granted, it's not really an enterprise product either. But VMware's products will save you lots of headaches, they perform better and offer much more features. It's sad to see companies don't appreciate quality software anymore, because VMware has always produced just that. That has been the trend lately, just like companies are moving towards Google's products just because they are free, even while there are much better products on the market.
VMWare has a proven history. They have set the bar and when potential problems are brought to their attention, they address it. Everybody else is simply a VMWare wannabe.
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.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
First of all let me say VMware makes one rock solid hypervisor. Out of all of the hypervisors I have used theirs is the least prone to issues.
VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.
1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.
When I am engineering a solution and have a problem to solve I am presented with many challenges to present VMware as a solution. Finding the product that suits our needs, Figuring out what license would suit our needs, getting a quote from the vendor without a lot of harassment after the fact trying to close the sale. Rather than deal with all of that many people have found that the open source projects like KVM and XEN are good enough for their needs. Not to mention the huge numbers of free cloud products such as Openstack that gives you enterprise features "for free". At the end of the day I don't care what product get's used as long as the problem is solved with the minimal amount of budget and effort.
A small startup does not want to deal with legacy software and maintaining licensing and dealing with windows boxes. They do great with the "enterprisey" douchebags with their complex setups that cause more outages than they solve but lean and small companies don't want their stuff.
The reality here is the world is slowly changing. Big monolitic companies are failing because their business models are unsustainable without cheating and people are getting fed up with the cheating. VMware has to answer a question to themselves. Do I want to serve the needs of the dying dinosaur companies or do I want to be in business in 10 years?
ESXi / vSphere Hypervisor provides identical functionality (with the exception of vCenter for Centrally managing multiple vSphere servers) freely.
What you get when you buy vSphere is VMware's support, including their involvement to write additional modules to run in conjunction with some obscure aspect of your deployment (read: the slight issues experienced within the ESX when using an LSI iSCSI HBA in conjunction with a NetApp Filer that do not exist within an QLogic iSCSI HBA).
Support is worth something, especially in Production environments. The problem here is that VMware decided that they could wring more money from their customers within ESX 5, and it has proven to be more than the market will bear.
Thirty four characters live here.
The number of people talking about VirtualBox and VirtualPC in this thread is astounding. We're talking about "enterprise" virtualization here, not keeping some dev boxes on your desktop. I think you need to be talking about Hyper-V and Xen, as well as all the competing VDI solutions.
Friends don't let friends rely on Oracle support.
Shame on you. Or maybe you don't know how useless it is.
I'm a fan of VMware but clearly any competition - and specifically, the more robust the competition gets the better the pricing models will be for the end users.
Right now we have very little if any issues with our virtual infrastructure - although View could use some work (we're still on 4.0 though...). VMware's support is excellent. Their tools are excellent. Their online documentation is excellent. Other than $ there wouldn't be a lot of motivation to start shopping for another vendor anytime soon.
But I also trust and expect that VMware will continue to be cutting edge in the VM sphere since it's the focus of their business (vs. Microsoft - who's focus is who the hell knows these days).
D
Expensive, bloated and chock full of unnecessary middleware and abstraction layers? That's usually what "enterprise software" means.
Two years ago, VMware was the only serious player in the enterprise hypervisor market. It could demand a price premium and had weight with other software platform vendors to demand support.
Now, with Hyper-V being somewhat more mature and with the Xen product line, VMware is falling into a competitive market. Naturally, there will be an erosion of market share in that case.
The bigger threat that faces VMware is the same threat that faced Netscape in the 1990s-- VMware is a competitor of Hyper-V which Microsoft can include "for free" in its server operating systems. And Microsoft still has the same monopoly influence over the major hardware vendors (to discourage pre-installs or reseller agreements). And it can control the licensing for its operating systems to inconvenience VMware customers (you have to buy a separate license for each ESX VM, but if you run on Hyper-V you get 10 VM licenses for free) and/or control its support of its enterprise application stack (We'll only support Exchange/Sharepoint/SQL Server/Link/IIS/whatever if it's running on Hyper-V. If it's ESX, please reproduce the problem on physical hardware to make sure it's not an ESX issue)
--Joe
I work for a major *.edu -- we use VMware, we pay their exorbitant pricing, and subsequently get threats of additional fees for not renewing support on time (an amusing tactic). We don't really find ourselves using the fancy feature sets. In fact, a large part of our *.edu is going KVM -- probably for similar reasons, more likely pricing. As others have said, VMware continues to change their licensing models -- it ends up being nickle-and-diming for features, where I'd just rather pay one flat price and just be able to use the entire product. KVM/Xen, et al, are still being actively developed and hammered on. I don't see any reason why those products couldn't eventually, significantly supplant VMware in areas such as mine where they get the job done effectively. If we want support for KVM/Xen, we can pay for that... much less money in the end.
Libvirt and the improvements to KVM plus Xen getting mainlined (is that the right term?) has to be hurting VMWare. Rackspace, along with a lot of major players, are spearheading OpenStack which ought to be a major open source enterprise player when it matures. Also, cloudstack recently went 100% open source which puts even more pressure on VMWare.
Also, projects like OpenVSwitch are putting major pressure on the proprietary vendors too.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Dear VMware,
I started out with you at Workstation version2. Since that time, I have never seen anyone really do Virtualisation as well as you did. Ever. Workstation is still sold with new features, and some nice pricing. I played and ran ESXI 3-5 and at each step its been accompanied with a rising tide of pain. No matter how brilliant a product is, if you start throwing in silly licensing and serious costs - and stupid complexity (in licensing) - well - you get what VMware is right now.
And the worst part is if you talk with their low and middle staff, they KNOW they still have the tech, and the cool. They also nod each time you state the obvious thing they can't fix. I have no idea who the board are at VMware. I only know they have the best product, a bleeding edge product, and that they have started the process thats going to actually kill it. Being the best isn't actually relevant. Being the best with a fair and sensible model means people will use you - and not lose you.
Right now, there are only two types of VMware (enterprise level) customers. Those who are paying with eyes watering and teeth grinding, and those who are at least looking seriously at moving away.
And I speak as someone who has serious love of VMware stuff, and they've reached a stage where they are so arrogant they don't even talk to me now. So I guess thats why HyperV sits in my racks these days *despite* being lesser to me.
The problem with being the best, and getting too serious a dose of arrogance, is that come the fall, there is no way back.
I'd really like them to get back to ESXI being the foot in the door brilliance it once was, and to having a sensible curve upwards in cost that people could look at and say its great, "what if we grow?" Now it just seems like growth? Haaa, pay us a lot of $$.
Its still the best virt stuff I have used. Period. But the gap between it and other stuff that works pretty damn well is smaller than its ever been. So they need to wake the fuck up and get real.
We`re all equal
Both of your points are incorrect. Virtualbox does do far more for free on it's *open-source* product, and if you need the infrastructure support you can purchase it from Oracle. Their current product is called Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Enterprise Solution - Solvent used for dissolving piles of cash in corporate vaults.
Some of the pain points of VMWare:
number of vCPUs, vMemory per VM
vSphere 5 now lets you have up to 32 vCPUs and 1024GB in a VM, which is good. vSphere4, which most people still, have is limited to only 8/256 per VM.
overhead:
VMWare takes a good 15-30%. Again the hypervisor in vShere 5 is a bit better performer.
stability:
I/O drivers are included in the hypervisor, which is a bit scary.
Pricing
The VMWare pricing model is overly confusing. Costs for added more vRAM to the pool? yuk.. vsphere5 makes this even worse.
I kinda see KVM as taking off here in the future. A lot of development is focusing that way..
FUNK!
For those of us considering moving to virtualization in the next few months, the discussion that follows can be VERY valuable.
I stopped caring about vmware when their marketing people got editing rights over their technical documentation. Seriously, go to their website, try to figure out what product will work for you (if you can make it through the marketing drivel) then look at the documentation for it.
Technical documentation is supposed to be .. technical. If you screw over the IT admins managing your product they're going to search for alternatives.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
That submitter Lashat is shilling for EMC.
I've been a VMware customer since 1999, and I must count myself among those disappointed by recent releases and pricing changes. Parallels, Microsoft, Citrix, and Oracle all have competitive offerings, at least two of which are substantially free software. If we hadn't invested so much time and energy into VMware at work, I'd seriously consider switching to HyperV or Xen.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Generally, I agree... but VirtualBox is only a few features away from competing.
At *HOME*, I run VBox on my OpenSolaris box... four SATA drives in Raid-Z2... phpVirtualBox to manage...
I admire your pluck. And I cried when it left, but OpenSolaris is dead. Long live OpenIndiana.
The Admin and the Engineer
VMWare supports live replication. Why just migrate when you can have automatic, near zero downtime fail over with live replication?
Good luck, VMWare? Hehe, you seriously overestimate the live migration feature. Or rather, it is no longer that special. Even HyperV has live migration. The difference is, VMWare does it VERY well. And I've yet to see anyone come close to the live replication that VMWare does.
Don't be offended by this post. I just don't think you're talking real business. Maybe it's "kick ass" for a home setup or a 3 person office.
Recent Experience
We tried Hyper-V for 6 months, and it was the most god awful unstable piece of crap I've ever worked with. A brand new IBM x3650 m3 running 12 cores crashed on a weekly basis and corrupted its main RAID running Windows Server 2008 R2. I think we can all agree that Microsoft virtualization, be it VirtualPC or HyperV is just absolute shit.
We've since switched to vSphere/ESXi, and haven't had a single crash. Everything is running fast and stable. I can live migrate any of the machines. Should a disaster happen, I can bring up another ESXi machine in on any other server or replacement hard drives (should our hot swap drives also fail) in about 5 minutes. Time is money on my network, and I don't have time to screw around. HyperV is not a 5 minute install, and I doubt your solution is either.
I can use VMPlayer instead of VirtualPC which is also free as in beer, not speech. ESXi is also free as in beer, though it is well worth the license for more features. And yes, it does live migrations. Unlike MS solutions, VMWare supports installs on Linux. I rather run Windows 7 in VMPlayer on Ubuntu, than run Ubuntu on Windows 7.
Being in a major production environment where every minute of downtime is a lost customer, I can't play around with anyone that doesn't have major support. That pretty much means Microsoft, Citrix, or VMWare. And of those three, I've had the best luck with VMWare. I've even heard Citrix is good, especially in VDI.
I don't think VMWare is in any need of luck. I know of no serious business looking for 4th party solutions for their major production servers. As someone else said, maybe for a VERY small shop, maybe for a dev box, but not for Enterprise.
Setup
What is your setup and why in Spagetti Monster's name are you running VM over NFS ethernet? Either go RAID or fiber to a SAN. That does not sound like a good Enterprise setup. Are we talking 10GB over a dedicated line (doable) or 1GB over switch (WTF)? If it's the latter, I bet you have a hell of a write to disk latency problem if you run more than 1 production VM. Personally, I'd go fiber SAN if RAID wasn't an option, but then again, I run 12 VMs on 2 64bit servers alongside a small array of dedicated servers. I'd laugh an AoE based VM proposal right out of my office.
I'm just taking a wild guess you aren't running a rack, or have network intensive users/applications. In my situation, I have to deal with about 80 workstations, a remote office, and 4 internet data connections on top of the servers themselves, including a 13TB file server and 20TB of backup storage. I can eat bandwidth with the best of them. When you can no longer count your routers and switches on your fingers, then I'd more willing to listen.
So, I don't know who you are posting to, because it's not really SMB or Enterprise.
I8-D
+1. Million.
EMC/VMware got greedy with the licensing for v5 and anyone who used some the nicer features (vRAM oversubscription) could potentially find themselves paying a lot.
The drastic limit applied to vRAM in the lower tier editions of ESXi 5 smacks of greed. They might not get caught on this now, but it was bald-faced enough to make people think about going to v5 and to evaluate HyperV instead. I might add that HyperV looks a lot more attractive since MS gives away Windows guests licenses that you'd otherwise pay for with VMware. If you virtualize a lot of Windows servers, going to HyperV could save you huge dollars, whereas vSphere 5 will cost you more.
Consider NetWare: It was a better directory/file/print server than NT, but Microsoft made a compelling argument that NT4 and, eventually, Win2K were good enough that it was worth losing some features, especially if it meant cutting down on the number of platforms and boxes to manage. The pitch for HyperV is very, very similar.
HyperV might not be so hot now, but VMware can't get complacent. Now is the time to put the boots to HyperV, not cede market to it.
--srj/mmv
I don't know if you're a marginal case or not, but I had a VMware employee that they felt that they had to raise prices because server core and memory densities were getting to the point where they were going to start losing revenue.
They said they had seen a tendency among very large customers to actually cut CPU licensing. Earlier adopters had started smaller on older hardware that didn't have the massive amount of CPU and RAM that's common today and the old per-CPU licensing model meant that growth in these environments meant more licenses.
But with memory and CPU densities growing, these customers now need fewer licenses, even though they still have VM growth, because they have been buying 24 core, 128GB boxes to replace 16/64 or smaller boxes. Each new box can replace 2 or sometimes 3 older ones.
IMHO, they're just making up for the general reduction in price they had once they started offering EssentialsPlus ESXi. This was much cheaper than ESX 3.5 with vCenter and vMotion licensing.
I also wonder if maybe they shouldn't have switched from per-socket to per-core licensing, but charging less per core than they had per socket. This would have allowed stable revenue with increased core counts.