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PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack

Posted by samzenpus on from the trying-a-different-flavor dept.

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."

9 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.

    1. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    2. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. PayPal Uses OpenStack by grusapa · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Re:Good Riddens by PhrstBrn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re: Even for nonprofits by MrL0G1C · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  5. Re:Good Riddens by philip.paradis · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

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  6. Re:VMware for free by mysidia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.