PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack

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."

Comments

Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[alen]

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

[LordLimecat]

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.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

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.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

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.

PayPal Uses OpenStack

[grusapa]

http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/paypal/

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

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+).

Re:Good Riddens

[PhrstBrn]

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: Even for nonprofits

[MrL0G1C]

Each chair makes more than $300,000.00 per year

Absolutely disgusting, taking peoples charitable donations and living like lords.

I decided to check your facts, the president of red cross US gets $1million a year!! Some people have no shame.

Re:Good Riddens

[philip.paradis]

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 facilities.

Do you actually operate anything in a KVM environment?

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

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.

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

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.).